Thread by @QuinnyPig

Speaking of shitposts: @azure paying @forrester for reprint rights to demonstrate @awscloud's superiority is funny / normal, but WTF is going on over at @alibaba_cloud?!

Let's find out.

They're onto me already.

Asks for address and phone number. Fair enough. Now it wants a credit card. Also fair.
Forgive me if I decline to post it here.

I give @awscloud grief about their free tier, but at least there's only one of those.

Okay, FaaS. Let's read the terms first.

It starts off worrying.

And my eyes are glazing over, plus I'm not going to fight a legal battle in China anytime soon. I'll be sure not to upload anything sensitive.

I...

This is genius. "Who are you, as a user?"

"We turned these on but won't bill you if you don't use them." I suspect I will accidentally incur logging and monitoring charges. Oh dear.

Uh what is going on with @alibaba_cloud's tab situation? It's like every @azure login redirect spawned a new tab.

Let's take a moment to reflect upon just how thoroughly my western public school education has failed me...

Which region shall I pick?

We pause here to highlight that I will be blocking any “hur hur hur it’s shitty because China” takes. It’s not funny, it’s racist.

We’re judging @alibaba_cloud on its technical merits, not its country of origin.

All right. We're going with Frankfurt since I don't know exactly what terms I agreed to earlier, and is it *really* shitposting if it doesn't involve at least three distinct sovereign legal systems?

Ooh, it tells me what to expect. I could get used to this.

It's concerning that all of the Python "Popular Templates" that @alibaba_cloud suggests are a version that's been EOL'd.

There are only two Python3 templates suggested and they both are far from trivial "get started" projects.

We'll go with this one. I give it a URL, it grabs the images from the URL and stores them in OSS, which I'll hazard is @alibaba_cloud's S3 equivalent.

"This is UNIX. I know this!" NO. NO YOU DON'T, GIRL FROM JURASSIC PARK! TRUST ME YOU WOULD RATHER DIE BY RAPTOR but we're gonna press ahead anyway.

Observability level set to "fuck it."

This isn't half-bad. I'd suggest that @alibaba_cloud adjust the Getting Started flow to automatically enable / create the OSS bucket . I also need to manually select the region, but the function already knows where it is.

I enabled OSS, created a buckey "scrapy-pony," and updated the code.

Okay, I've gotten it configured. This entire @alibaba_cloud interface is an incredibly bright *SEA* of white, so it's only fair I point the image scraper at the only thing whiter I've seen in recent days, the @fsf's staff and board page.

And it throws an error claiming the authorization header is invalid. Hmm...

It needed to be told that this was https, and it managed to parse the url via regexp (YIKES) to find the images of aggressively white people, but then it errors on on trying to write the object.

Yeah, it's pretty clear that the authorization stuff that's supposed to work... isn't. I kinda blame @alibaba_cloud on this one.

Ah! After a bit of hunting in the console we find it hiding.
Grant it full access because why the heck not!

https://twitter.com/wanghq/status/1377058707373092866?s=20

And lo and behold, we're now in possession of a bucket in the whitest of interfaces, containing pictures of the very whitest of dudes.

Okay, great success. Now let's delete it. First I have to verify my phone number.

Now I have to go back and delete resources manually, which fails to please me.

Oh god. Every time I tell it to recheck I get a new SMS code. This is terrible UX.

Okay, account deleted.

There were some sharp edges, but I can see why @forrester gave @alibaba_cloud the high rating it did for FaaS. It shows promise!

Yeah, I'd be hard pressed to say that it's got a stronger current offering than AWS does. Reading the notes on this report show that it beats AWS on DX, Programming Model (wat), and "support for specialized workloads" (wat wat).

I... don't agree.

https://twitter.com/MarzzNyc/status/1377062780486881289?s=20

Rather, I need to be shown more data as to how they arrived at their conclusion before I accept it. It's good, but it lacks Lambda's polish.