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Comment by biggerChris | Hacker News Reader

I understand AWS is the bread and butter of Amazon. Their infrastructure to run a book store as consumer goods was a good move.

With that in mind.

AWS is over engineered. It took me 12 mins to learn how to turn on an instance 4 years ago.

When I was learning,by randomly clicking, I apparently open up machines in 6 different locations. Got a bill for computers I didn’t know where on, which I haven’t ssh into.

I called the service and they pointed out all the instances; the customer service representative knew this was a common issue for beginners. My money was refunded.

Nowadays, they have global views.

AWS is extremely complicated just so you can SSH into it. Come on. Not cool.

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You are not the target audience.

AWS makes their money off of enterprise customers. The people who use AWS at that level have usually learned to use it. And it really is a skill.

AWS is not an infrastructure provider, it’s an infrastructure framework. You can spend years learning it and only have gone through a small part of its services on offer.

Bad for newbies, as you say. They do have some services for these kinds of use cases too (lightsail), but it is not at the top of their priority list to cater to them.

The strategy works. And to be honest, not everything has to be easy to use to newcomers if it degrades the experience for those taking the time to learn the hard way.

Flying a plane isn’t something you’re learning just off the UI for example.

That strategy has been seriously challenged by Azure who sell solutions on cloud with Microsoft pack. Old fashioned enterprise favors Azure and workspace like solutions more so easy to use is even more important.

Why? They don’t even have engineering team and will never hire many. They only have “IT”

I think they will still refund you today. Having said that, obviously AWS listens to the crowd, which means most of them does not know how to work on vm level.

Sad situations that most IT workers today probably have never physically touched a server or installed any OS, but that’s what minimum 6 figures IT salary brings us.

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