Comment by sethhochberg
5 hours ago
I always find the idea that there's something to navigate kind of curious - as you say, its lots of managed versions of open source tools and a mix of proprietary management frameworks on top. Some of what they offer are genuinely unique products for niche use cases, but if you have that niche you probably know what services can support it, like the people in the other comments here mentioning the IoT APIs.
But me (or my teams) are rarely asking the question of "how should I run my service on AWS" in general, its much more typically "I need a managed Postgres database, what AWS product offers that" or "I have an OCI image, what managed platform can I run that in" or even "I want this endpoint to be available all the time, but its usage is very unpredictable/intermittent, so I don't want to pay for idle compute". There might still be a couple of possible answers for those questions, but by the point I arrive there I'm solving for a specific problem.
Its sort of like walking into a kitchen hungry and seeing 3 knives and a stove and oven and a dozen peelers and can openers etc etc and being very overwhelmed by all of this (do I need the knife with a smooth edge or the serrated one?) until you decide you want to eat a grilled cheese, and then grabbing a skillet to put onto a burner and everything making sense once you actually start to cook a specific thing.
They've gotten much better at streamlining setup and suggesting sane defaults over the years. I hear the GP that there soooo many knobs. I've found that AWS does a pretty good job, like in the postgres compatible RDS case, of suggesting defaults that make sense for most people. And when you run into issues / scaling problems, you can Claude your way to which settings to research.
The only one that still drives me insane is IAM. That product makes me feel dumb every time I use it, even for simple use cases like "I want a managed redis compatible instance that can only be accessed by these resources." The groups and users and roles and VPCs have never felt intuitive to me, despite having a clear idea of what I want the end state to be.