6 ms·

You know what I've realized that's really important. More AWS tutorials is really needed. There's numerous of new programmers who want to learn AWS, but can't f

You know what I've realized that's really important. More AWS tutorials is really needed. There's numerous of new programmers who want to learn AWS, but can't finish building anything because they get buried in documentation. I find there are a lot of high-level abstracted tutorials, but for the new services, there aren't a lot of detailed tutorials. For instance, an implemented cognito->gateway->lambda->dynamodb is really hard for a newbie to do.

ninjay 11y ago
I found this series very helpful: https://medium.com/aws-activate-startup-blog https://medium.com/aws-activate-startup-blog
jcyw 11y ago
I have some good experience with qwiklab. Their self-paced lab starts with UI, then turned to aws cli. They also give a nice lesson on CF.
euphemize 11y ago
Great point. Also, the pipeline you mention removes many risks related to the 'common' mistakes mentioned in the article (scaling, monitoring, provisioning it all done for you - or almost). We're using gateway -> lambda -> dynamodb, and there are a tons of gotchas and small things that AWS need to iron out, especially with gateway -> lambda.
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  Agreed. Was looking into that for a serverless model inspired by (1) but there is still loads of things they can't do/won't do 1 https://github.com/serverless/serverless https://github.com/serverless/serverless
  - ac360 11y ago
    Working on it :) We are hacking away full time on the Serverless Framework and have some big features coming in the next few days.
tedmiston 11y ago
I definitely agree that better tutorials and/or a simpler interface would makes AWS more accessible and user friendly. A YC S15 startup, Convox (http://convox.com/ http://convox.com/), aims to "make AWS as easy as using Heroku." It looks really promising.
- autotune 11y ago
  There are also quite a few Ansible core modules for EC2 if you're looking for a uniform way to manage your resources outside of the AWS GUI, although to be honest I'm not sure if that's "easier" so much as more flexible. Still solves the problem with mistake #1.
  - manojlds 11y ago
    Would recommend Terraform here - https://terraform.io/ https://terraform.io/
  - obulpathi 11y ago
    Try Kubernetes may be?
    - paulddraper 11y ago
      That's for containers. It isn't used to, say, setup SQS.
- jacques_chester 11y ago
  As an alternative, Cloud Foundry already drives AWS, as well as Azure, vSphere and OpenStack. Those coming from Heroku will find most of what they want, including buildpacks. Those who want to skip buildpacks can use docker images instead. Disclaimer: I work for Pivotal, who donate the majority of the engineering effort to CF.
  - nzoschke 11y ago
    Convox member here. CloudFoundry is a really solid platform, but there is a very important distinction between CloudFoundry and Convox. Convox is a very thin layer on top of "raw" AWS. It gives you a PaaS abstraction but behind the scenes is well configures VPC, ECS, Kinesis, Lambda, KMS, etc. For those of us with no need to run on multiple clouds, using pure AWS is simpler, cheaper and more reliable than a middleware like CloudFoundry or Deis. If you want to run a private platform without bringing in operation dependencies like etcd (Deis) or Lattice (CloudFoundry), give Convox a look.
kartan 11y ago
> There's numerous of new programmers who want to learn AWS, but can't finish building anything because they get buried in documentation. I agree partially. In the end the documentation is what you are going to need to read sooner or later. Or trainings equivalent to that documentation. Good tutorials are good for starting, but doesn't make you a professional. I guess that in 10 years any one will be able to create websites for billions of internet connected users. But for now, as easy at it is, it is still complicated enough to require an expert. In the same fashion that 20 years ago you needed an expert to make a 3D game and nowadays there is plenty of technologies that allow you to do that with a limited amount of programming knowledge. I have seen horrible things, usually security related, because non trained people think that they can achieve anything just with standard configurations and quick tutorials. And it looks like they where able to do it, until something really bad happens. Even people with long experience can make mistakes because it is a complex thing.
- late2part 11y ago
  AKA what happens when you take a bunch of God complex programmers and set them loose operating production infrastructure on the Internet?
meddlepal 11y ago
The real issue is that AWS isn't designed as a tool for product developers. Product developers get asked to use it but do not usually have a clue about good systems engineering. AWS was designed for ops and systems engineers first and foremost.
- bradhe 11y ago
  > Product developers get asked to use it but do not usually have a clue about good systems engineering. AWS was designed for ops and systems engineers first and foremost. Yeah that line is blurring, too.
- dblooman 11y ago
  That may have been true 5 years ago, but a lot of the newer services require developers to just read the documentation, not have a serious amount of background in the setup of the service they are using. Look at things like ECS and Lambda for compute, SQS for messaging etc.
20years 11y ago
acloud.guru has some pretty decent video tutorials. It was easier for me to start with those tutorials before diving into the AWS documentation.
autotune 11y ago
There's a tutorial on the AWS Labs GitHub that goes through this exact scenario: https://github.com/awslabs/api-gateway-secure-pet-store https://github.com/awslabs/api-gateway-secure-pet-store.
simonebrunozzi 11y ago
CloudAcademy provides several good ones.
manyxcxi 11y ago
I agree that a lot more AWS tutorials and cookbooks would be helpful- but one reason I find so many developers having issues wrapping their head around AWS concepts is that most developers don't have the basic understanding of what they're doing with AWS. Programmers that just write code don't really need to know ANYTHING about AWS because someone else should be setting it up for them. I see so many people doing the most ridiculous things or leaving things completely wide open because they have no concept of network topology, firewalls, segments, VPCs, security groups, deployment templates, etc. I would not trust the vast majority of developers I've ever met to properly setup a simple architecture in AWS because the things you NEED to know aren't covered in the things they've been focusing on for most of their lives. It was predominantly in the domain of the operations/networking/system admin side of things. I think there's a big need for a crash course for devs that starts with all the crap they previously ignored or had someone else do for them and I say this as someone who has always written code first and done sysadmin second.
tie_ 11y ago
As much as I agree with your point about being hard, I'd also like to add out that there isn't anything even remotely similar to documentation on how a pure dev person could do this outside of AWS, with the lack of managed cognito, API gateway + lambda, and dynamodb. Making those notions and technologies easy and cheap to access AWS suddenly gave devs the idea that they can roll out complex infrastructure on their own, similar to copy-pasting a piece of code. Well, it is still a bit harder than that, and if you are that kind of dev (which I'd applaud), you'd better dedicate some time to learning those technologies.
- kcmastrpc 11y ago
  This is probably one of my biggest gripes. Our CTO/PMs are like "you weren't able to containerize and get our app autoscaling in a few days? I don't get it? How long will it take? While you're at it, can you implement kinesis/lambda/microservices for the parts of our app that are taking more than 3000ms?" Me: "I just said I was interested in DevOps and would like to give it a shot, I don't know how long it'll take, I'm working on it."

ninjay 11y ago

I found this series very helpful: https://medium.com/aws-activate-startup-blog https://medium.com/aws-activate-startup-blog

jcyw 11y ago

I have some good experience with qwiklab. Their self-paced lab starts with UI, then turned to aws cli. They also give a nice lesson on CF.

euphemize 11y ago

Great point. Also, the pipeline you mention removes many risks related to the 'common' mistakes mentioned in the article (scaling, monitoring, provisioning it all done for you - or almost). We're using gateway -> lambda -> dynamodb, and there are a tons of gotchas and small things that AWS need to iron out, especially with gateway -> lambda.

LoSboccacc 11y ago
Agreed. Was looking into that for a serverless model inspired by (1) but there is still loads of things they can't do/won't do 1 https://github.com/serverless/serverless https://github.com/serverless/serverless
- ac360 11y ago
  Working on it :) We are hacking away full time on the Serverless Framework and have some big features coming in the next few days.

tedmiston 11y ago

I definitely agree that better tutorials and/or a simpler interface would makes AWS more accessible and user friendly. A YC S15 startup, Convox (http://convox.com/ http://convox.com/), aims to "make AWS as easy as using Heroku." It looks really promising.

autotune 11y ago
There are also quite a few Ansible core modules for EC2 if you're looking for a uniform way to manage your resources outside of the AWS GUI, although to be honest I'm not sure if that's "easier" so much as more flexible. Still solves the problem with mistake #1.
- manojlds 11y ago
  Would recommend Terraform here - https://terraform.io/ https://terraform.io/
- obulpathi 11y ago
  Try Kubernetes may be?
  - paulddraper 11y ago
    That's for containers. It isn't used to, say, setup SQS.
jacques_chester 11y ago
As an alternative, Cloud Foundry already drives AWS, as well as Azure, vSphere and OpenStack. Those coming from Heroku will find most of what they want, including buildpacks. Those who want to skip buildpacks can use docker images instead. Disclaimer: I work for Pivotal, who donate the majority of the engineering effort to CF.
- nzoschke 11y ago
  Convox member here. CloudFoundry is a really solid platform, but there is a very important distinction between CloudFoundry and Convox. Convox is a very thin layer on top of "raw" AWS. It gives you a PaaS abstraction but behind the scenes is well configures VPC, ECS, Kinesis, Lambda, KMS, etc. For those of us with no need to run on multiple clouds, using pure AWS is simpler, cheaper and more reliable than a middleware like CloudFoundry or Deis. If you want to run a private platform without bringing in operation dependencies like etcd (Deis) or Lattice (CloudFoundry), give Convox a look.

kartan 11y ago

> There's numerous of new programmers who want to learn AWS, but can't finish building anything because they get buried in documentation. I agree partially. In the end the documentation is what you are going to need to read sooner or later. Or trainings equivalent to that documentation. Good tutorials are good for starting, but doesn't make you a professional. I guess that in 10 years any one will be able to create websites for billions of internet connected users. But for now, as easy at it is, it is still complicated enough to require an expert. In the same fashion that 20 years ago you needed an expert to make a 3D game and nowadays there is plenty of technologies that allow you to do that with a limited amount of programming knowledge. I have seen horrible things, usually security related, because non trained people think that they can achieve anything just with standard configurations and quick tutorials. And it looks like they where able to do it, until something really bad happens. Even people with long experience can make mistakes because it is a complex thing.

late2part 11y ago
AKA what happens when you take a bunch of God complex programmers and set them loose operating production infrastructure on the Internet?

meddlepal 11y ago

The real issue is that AWS isn't designed as a tool for product developers. Product developers get asked to use it but do not usually have a clue about good systems engineering. AWS was designed for ops and systems engineers first and foremost.

bradhe 11y ago
> Product developers get asked to use it but do not usually have a clue about good systems engineering. AWS was designed for ops and systems engineers first and foremost. Yeah that line is blurring, too.
dblooman 11y ago
That may have been true 5 years ago, but a lot of the newer services require developers to just read the documentation, not have a serious amount of background in the setup of the service they are using. Look at things like ECS and Lambda for compute, SQS for messaging etc.

20years 11y ago

acloud.guru has some pretty decent video tutorials. It was easier for me to start with those tutorials before diving into the AWS documentation.

autotune 11y ago

There's a tutorial on the AWS Labs GitHub that goes through this exact scenario: https://github.com/awslabs/api-gateway-secure-pet-store https://github.com/awslabs/api-gateway-secure-pet-store.

simonebrunozzi 11y ago

CloudAcademy provides several good ones.

manyxcxi 11y ago

I agree that a lot more AWS tutorials and cookbooks would be helpful- but one reason I find so many developers having issues wrapping their head around AWS concepts is that most developers don't have the basic understanding of what they're doing with AWS. Programmers that just write code don't really need to know ANYTHING about AWS because someone else should be setting it up for them. I see so many people doing the most ridiculous things or leaving things completely wide open because they have no concept of network topology, firewalls, segments, VPCs, security groups, deployment templates, etc. I would not trust the vast majority of developers I've ever met to properly setup a simple architecture in AWS because the things you NEED to know aren't covered in the things they've been focusing on for most of their lives. It was predominantly in the domain of the operations/networking/system admin side of things. I think there's a big need for a crash course for devs that starts with all the crap they previously ignored or had someone else do for them and I say this as someone who has always written code first and done sysadmin second.

tie_ 11y ago

As much as I agree with your point about being hard, I'd also like to add out that there isn't anything even remotely similar to documentation on how a pure dev person could do this outside of AWS, with the lack of managed cognito, API gateway + lambda, and dynamodb. Making those notions and technologies easy and cheap to access AWS suddenly gave devs the idea that they can roll out complex infrastructure on their own, similar to copy-pasting a piece of code. Well, it is still a bit harder than that, and if you are that kind of dev (which I'd applaud), you'd better dedicate some time to learning those technologies.

kcmastrpc 11y ago
This is probably one of my biggest gripes. Our CTO/PMs are like "you weren't able to containerize and get our app autoscaling in a few days? I don't get it? How long will it take? While you're at it, can you implement kinesis/lambda/microservices for the parts of our app that are taking more than 3000ms?" Me: "I just said I was interested in DevOps and would like to give it a shot, I don't know how long it'll take, I'm working on it."