Honestly, even as a quite technical person, understanding AWS is not that easy. I've been in the situation of trying to run a very small app with basically zero budget on AWS a few years ago, and the sheer amount of services I needed to involve and things that needed to look for where quite overwhelming. I can easily imagine a non-technical person getting completely lost in the interface.
On AWS, I know how to manage IAM roles, set up EC2 instances, etc. etc.
The idea that only a dedicated IT professional should be using this product really cuts out a lot of people who can't afford a dedicated IT professional.
I agree with you about this, certainly:
> The idea that only a dedicated IT professional should be using this product really cuts out a lot of people who can't afford a dedicated IT professional.
But this is also like saying "You should have hired an expert to tell you that when the sailboat builder kit manual says drill into the back it actually means the front." Regardless of whether someone more experienced at this would know better, this UX is awful, its title is inaccurate, and the whole process around changing storage classes far more confusing than the UX makes it seem.
There are petabytes and petabytes of data from independent filmmakers that are rotting away on drives, and part of the issue is lack of other affordable options. So I get that "shoulda hired a sysadmin" is an easy response but that's not always an option, especially when there's dozens of hard drives or other complexities that make these tasks last weeks or months.
Now there are 6 different storage classes and loads of options to manage the objects and buckets.
Interestingly the latest storage class(S3 Intelligent-Tiering) was created to minimize the overhead of S3.