Dear early adaptors to Cloud and AWS,
What AWS service are you struggling to learn? What’s painful? What’s blocking you from doing what you want to do?
Has our documentation helped? What’s lacking?
👉🏽 Send me doc links and/or detailed specifics of what you need. I'm listening.💜
~Alejandra💁🏻♀️ y Canela🐾
Oldest comments (33)
Overall the UI and Docs are awful. I have seen some many people complaining about this on twitter and I still don't see any changes to make the ui and docs better.
Really? The docs are pretty good in IMO and the UI, while not great is good enough for most services. TBH I don’t use the UI much these days though.
I spent many years using Oracle products - now that is poor docs and UI!
I hear you that the UI and the docs should be held to a higher standard. I will pass this feedback to my team as well. (I am making a list of answers I receive online.)
Do you have more specific doc sections you want to point out that you found the most confusing?
I find the documentation, guides, and mental model pretty straightforward for most AWS services...
I tend to find things break down around permissions, groups, and how certain things plug together. That's inherently more complex in general but definitely where I struggle the most. I suspect any major cloud infrastructure provider's major opportunity for growth is the "how things plug together" piece of things anyway.
I SO agree with you, and I was actually just mentioning this to a colleague last week!
Do you have a specific group offering or service from AWS that you found the most confusing to "plug together" ? What do you think we should have done better?
App Mesh and Event Bridge seem like great examples of this, but don't solve the real challenge... IAM. Maybe the most interesting thing I've seen in that space is cloud recorder. A chrome extension that watches you take actions in the dashboard and outputs Terraform, limited IAM JSON, er cetera... Why doesn't AWS just have this themselves???
Wow! This exists??!
For beginners it's not intuitive at all compared to Firebase. I am more inclined to start my side/small projects with Firebase always.
Amazon Cognito!
All the documentation is there but the way it is organized, important information is hidden in subsections and there are few practical examples.
I have pieced together my own integration into my monolith but it was trial and error.
I would like to add that while documentation is not an issue, sometimes what I wish itd come with are recommended values for certain properties and when does it make sense to increase and decrease it and what are the pros and cons of that.
One example being ReservedCpncurency setting on LAMBDA or VisibilityTimeout value on SQS.
Documentation would tell you that it takes an integer or a String and what it does. However, when you are developing a production level app, end user has no idea what he/she should set those values to.
I only found out about it after running into some article only. For instance, how they recommend that VisibilityTimeout setting for SQS should be set to 5 times the value of a LAMBDA function timeout value.
Itd be good to have a central repository somewhere where one can find this sort of best practices.
The DevOps tools (CodeDeploy and CodePipeline) are a pain to work with. No proper documentation and very bad logs.
I have received this feedback on Twitter where I made this same post. Thank you for your feedback, you're not alone! We have much to improve.
I've not been able to find a solution to a very simple thing...
A Static website hosted with S3 + cloudfront that 301 redirects to both HTTPS and to a WWW subdomain.
I've been able to redirect to one or the other, but not both.
DynamoDB. It has some of the worst documentation that I've ever seen. Implementation as well is mind bogglingly complex.
Check out dynamodbbook.com (no association, just fan) - goes through so much of how/why to use dynamodb - it's a VERY different mindset than typical relational databases, and I agree the aws documentation is factual, just not functional.
Thanks for the suggestion!
In my opinion, it's best to not expect ANYTHING out of DynamoDB and start with a basic assumption that it is a key-value store. Then, you can build from there.
I'm saying this because almost every feature that I assumed worked in one way, turned out to work in another. Plus, there are so many features behaving differently in different scenarios, which, if you want to find that out, you have to go through 3 different documentation pages or blog posts.
We have an amazing DA that is currently working on improving the DynamoDB docs. He agrees with you, trust me! Thank you for this feedback, I will be passing this on to him.
Fargate docs needs tutorial like guides
Most services are ok in isolation but it’s when you start tying them all together It gets complicated really fast!