It taught me how much I do not want to use AWS for personal reasons. In fact, I wouldn't even build a revenue business on it. A few years ago, a friend gifted

It taught me how much I do not want to use AWS for personal reasons. In fact, I wouldn't even build a revenue business on it. A few years ago, a friend gifted me a domain name, and simultaneously, I signed up to AWS so I could goof around with all the free-tier cloud features, and basically just learn some cloud architecting. I quickly settled on the Bitnami image of a MediaWiki stack on top of Ubuntu. It was fairly easy to get set up, but of course I quickly realized why the average Joe does not want to do this sort of thing. I had to be my own sysadmin, which I knew fairly well, but I also had to be my own CISO, and the logistics of running a bare OS on a VM on the public Internet are definitely daunting in the 2020s. I attracted futile probes of my ssh port and I also attracted some sort of spammers to create throwaway MediaWiki accounts. In fact, the aforementioned friend showed me a few security holes in my MW configuration, and I was thankful he did it and not some malicious stranger. Eventually, MW failed in some perplexing way, and I was frankly appalled at the myriad ways that AWS costs could literally get out of control and I'd have a 5-figure monthly bill with little recourse. I pulled out completely and shut it all down, after a few months had elapsed. All in all, it was a good experiment, and really not disastrous; I did accomplish the learning of various cloud administration techniques, so I appreciated that. I don't miss the crazy opaque billing. There was so much more to learn. Perhaps someday.