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> It's incredibly frustrating when Amazon does nothing to disseminate information about how to more effectively use their cloud infrastructure. Hmmm. We have t

> It's incredibly frustrating when Amazon does nothing to disseminate information about how to more effectively use their cloud infrastructure. Hmmm. We have thousands of pages of reference documentation and tutorials. We have forums. We have a team of Solution Architects ready, willing, and able to help.

bjt 13y ago
Though I agree that the documentation is comprehensive, that itself can be a barrier. It all seems very deeply nested and enterprisey. I'm often left wanting a layer of noob-friendly UI or documentation, or "You probably want X"-style guidelines that differentiate between typical use cases and non-typical ones. Compare, for example, the Digital Ocean UI for creating new VMs. It's a much more pleasant experience than the AWS Console for the new user with a small scale use case.
primitivesuave 13y ago
You're absolutely correct in that the documentation and tutorials are thorough and the support is outstanding (I've been helped before and am convinced of the quality of people doing support for AWS). I made that comment from the viewpoint of a programmer and business owner with the most surface-level sysadmin knowledge, who doesn't have the time to attend AWS conferences or read through hundreds of pages of documentation. I'm not asking Amazon to "dumb down" their documentation or tutorials, I just wish that there was somewhere that Amazon could succinctly state the best way of doing things. This could take the form of a novice guide, as the other commenter stated, or as links in the documentation to articles in the blogosphere that detail practical ways to get set up with a certain AWS technology. Also, in respect to this specific issue, the knee-jerk reaction that people on the AWS forums have in respect to scaling is to set up auto-scaling policies. Simple and intuitive ideas like hosting static websites on S3, hosting secure content on EC2, and combining the two, has very poor coverage in both the AWS documentation and on the Internet in general.

bjt 13y ago

Though I agree that the documentation is comprehensive, that itself can be a barrier. It all seems very deeply nested and enterprisey. I'm often left wanting a layer of noob-friendly UI or documentation, or "You probably want X"-style guidelines that differentiate between typical use cases and non-typical ones. Compare, for example, the Digital Ocean UI for creating new VMs. It's a much more pleasant experience than the AWS Console for the new user with a small scale use case.

primitivesuave 13y ago

You're absolutely correct in that the documentation and tutorials are thorough and the support is outstanding (I've been helped before and am convinced of the quality of people doing support for AWS). I made that comment from the viewpoint of a programmer and business owner with the most surface-level sysadmin knowledge, who doesn't have the time to attend AWS conferences or read through hundreds of pages of documentation. I'm not asking Amazon to "dumb down" their documentation or tutorials, I just wish that there was somewhere that Amazon could succinctly state the best way of doing things. This could take the form of a novice guide, as the other commenter stated, or as links in the documentation to articles in the blogosphere that detail practical ways to get set up with a certain AWS technology. Also, in respect to this specific issue, the knee-jerk reaction that people on the AWS forums have in respect to scaling is to set up auto-scaling policies. Simple and intuitive ideas like hosting static websites on S3, hosting secure content on EC2, and combining the two, has very poor coverage in both the AWS documentation and on the Internet in general.