AWS is so f-ing confusing sometimes.
It has always felt that AWS has been too playful with the naming of services, to the point of obfuscation. Sure, you and I know what EC2 and S3 are, and what an instance and a bucket are. But for new companies adopting AWS, I swear that a third of my time is translating AWS service names into industry terminology for them, and often here statements like:
- "Why don't they just call it a virtual machine or cloud storage?"
- "What the heck is an EBS or a Cognito?"
- etc, etc
Also, the first run of the AWS console can be overwhelming when compared to that of Digital Ocean (though I know the two aren't really comparable in terms of breadth of services offered, but look how obvious DO's call to action is).
Just immediate thoughts that pop into my head.
[1] AWS web console: http://imgur.com/GwAeBrC
[2] Digital Ocean console: http://imgur.com/a/cO3Kn
+ instances not really being deleted when 'terminated', so there's unnecessary clutter on your dashboard.
Ticket open since 2008: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=26111&sta...
They also still count against your usage limit, so workflow gets interrupted and you have to wait till they are actually deleted, but you can't really be sure when that happens.
So have a coffee, check back, nope not gone. Get another one, nope not gone.
Properties
InternetGatewayId
The ID of the Internet gateway.
This isn't the only example of entirely useless documentation.
Documentation for VPC users and VPC-less users are munged together. VPC users don't care about VPC-less arguments and documentation, and will never (since new customers must use VPCs). They should be completely separate documentation sets.
AMIs are critical but you have to dig into examples to find an up to date list ids, they're spread across multiple examples in multiple locations of the docs with no directions to find them.
Default values for properties and configurations don't appear to be documented anywhere. There are warnings about deleting the default VPC but no mention of how to remake it. Is the default VPC magic?
Object ids must be [A-Za-z0-9]. Why? Neither JSON nor Yaml have syntactic issues requiring this.
The documentation talks about Redis (cluster mode disabled) and Redis (cluster mode enabled). Redis (cluster mode disabled) is referred to as a cluster. But cluster mode is disabled? And on some pages the documentation uses "shards", on others "node groups", sometimes both - apparently these terms refer to the same things.
Scaling Redis (cluster mode disabled) Clusters only discusses single node clusters. Multi node (cluster mode disabled) clusters are discussed in Scaling Redis Clusters with Replica Nodes. Scaling Up Single-Node Redis Clusters shows as Scaling Up Redis Clusters in the sidebar.
Adding nodes to a cluster currently applies only if you are running Memcached or Redis (cluster mode disabled). Adding nodes applies to all clusters. AWS doesn't support adding nodes to an existing cluster in a partitioned Redis set. This is elucidated in the unlinked page Scaling Redis Clusters with Replica Nodes in a completely different section.
Articles frequently contain irrelevant asides, which makes following the documentation harrowing. Like Because Redis (cluster mode disabled) does not support partitioning your data across multiple clusters, each cluster in a Redis (cluster mode disabled) replication group contains the entire cache dataset. in the middle of Scaling Redis Clusters with Replica Nodes.
Edit: Removed a quote I misread.
Could also be https://www.draw.io