His key example seems...odd. Yeah, spinning up an Elasticache instance with Redis has some complexity...it's a managed service. You have to tell it some things

His key example seems...odd. Yeah, spinning up an Elasticache instance with Redis has some complexity...it's a managed service. You have to tell it some things for it to be managed for you. If you don't want to learn about it, you just spin up an EC2 instance (which itself is not really any more complex than spinning up a VM in any other virtualized platform), and install Redis onto it. If your experience is in Linux sysops, you can -totally do that-. That's really the key thing about most of these cloud providers...the barrier to entry really is about learning how to spin up a basic VM. All the other offerings, as complicated and unintuitive as they may be, are opt in things, designed to solve common needs. You want a scaling NoSQL DB? You can spin up EC2 instances and install your favorite flavor. It's then on you to ensure it scales properly. Or, you can read up on Dynamo, determine whether it fits your needs, then do the grunt work of setting it up in AWS, and let Amazon manage it for you. Etc. Complaining that taking advantage of ~all~ the offerings is a huge mental burden seems silly; of course it is. THERE ARE SO MANY OF THEM. But nothing is stopping you from just using EC2 to start, and using those other services only as you find the time and drive to learn about them and determine that you can benefit from them.