Agreed. The AWS developer docs are great but the first few chapters in e.g. SQS and SNS were "here's how to do it manually". Cloudformation is more of an append

Agreed. The AWS developer docs are great but the first few chapters in e.g. SQS and SNS were "here's how to do it manually". Cloudformation is more of an appendix. Though, devils advocate, if they all started with "install Terraform" that might be a tall order and put people off. We recently looked into AWS MSK (managed Kafka). Many of the crucial tasks, such as creation of topics, were more or less left as an exercise to the reader with some pretty distant dots to join. If they'd been forced to explain how to automate all the necessary tasks in MSK, they might have had to make better tools. Or we might have given up on it sooner.