Feature request: Please improve packaging & distribution #30
Description
This request is for AWS to hire someone to fix the packaging for its various customer-exposed tools (like this project). Specifically it's intended for the upper-management and executive team that should be overseeing customer experience.
The Linux packages are pretty bad. No dependency on AWS CLI, obscure package name, non-standard file paths, faulty install scripts, unnecessary install-time dependencies, and no official support for any particular Linux distro other than Ubuntu Server (presumably because that's what the developers use). No CI (seriously? it's built right into GitHub!), no matrix of target platforms, no packages submitted to distributions, no generic installer script.
Not only that, but the downloads and source code don't have any cryptographic signatures. If the packages were distributed by a package manager, you'd at least get signatures for free. But since there's not even a checksum listed on the AWS docs, the user has no way of knowing if their package or download has been tampered with. You're asking your customers to expose their internal networks to administrative users that have downloaded tools whose security is literally impossible to verify.
These are not senior-level tasks requiring rare talent. A core AWS team dedicated to open source could liaise with project teams like this one to standardize things like CI, linting, packaging, installing. Hiring for this shouldn't be challenging, even with the current job market - people all over the world do this for fun in their spare time.
Considering that AWS makes $59 Billion dollars a year, and has something like 100,000 engineers, there's no justification for the state of things. If this is how AWS manages their public tools, I can't imagine how shoddy the internal ones are. And judging on the number of bugs in the new Web Console, there's a much larger organizational issue at play (which doesn't bode well for AWS' stock price). All Azure needs to do to start eating your lunch is make better packages, and all the Linux nerds (like myself) will start opting for Azure first. The irony!