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Comment by ryanchants | Hacker News Reader

I always say that AWS docs are exhaustive, but exhausting. Mostly because they're spread across half a dozen places. The answer you need is normally in there somewhere, but good luck finding it. And when I remember the docs contain some fact I want re-reference, I can never find it again.

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Most of my interactions with AWS docs end up being pretty useless, as in they are information-free. Like describing how to fill out a form and press next in a wizard which boil down to "fill out the Name field with a name and press next" and every once in a while there will be a tiny amount of information but most of it is useless and usually the information you're looking for isn't there.

Nobody using AWS needs to be told "in order to add a hoozit, press the add hoozit button, fill out field A then fill out field B then fill out field C and then press next"

Now there's an interesting idea, have an LLM crawl their entire docs and cull everything obvious or content free and compile what's left

I recently implemented CloudFront signed urls for accessing S3, where my app uses KMS keys to sign the url. Sounds simple and obvious but for the entire history of Cloudfront and KMS it was not! It is not documented to work, nor could I find any explicit AWS documentation saying that it wouldn't work either. And there's a just bunch of anecdotal reports (blogs, github issues) that it doesn't work. But very recently (April I think) Cloudfront and KMS, for the first time ever, both started to support the same key algo/size. So it's now possible, but I stumbled on it, and have never seen a recipe for using them together. So AI doesn't know about it either!

I was finally able to stop managing and rotating TLS key pairs, replicating private keys globally to my apps.

So: who really reads those little boring announcements, and connects the dots? Seemingly, not even AWS themselves!

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