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> What do you think about this page: https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/

It is very dangerous. If you select the full-stack tutorial you get: "Time to Complete 30 minutes". It should say: "30 min to ruin your life" ;)

If you want to really learn AWS, then this page should be used as a reference of how to design a stack. If I were you I would read the tutorials to see which services are needed for a solution, but before doing anything, I would read the docs for each of those services to really understand them, then I would go back to the tutorial and actually do it, and - MOST IMPORTANTLY - I would read the pricing page for each service that you are going to use.

> Do you think it's irresponsible for AWS to encourage beginners to try their service when they apparently only intend it to be used by those with a computer science degree and 5-year apprenticeship under an experienced sysadmin?

100% - when I started working with AWS in 2016 I had a very hard time figuring it out, because I was looking for the simplicity the the marketing team was writing about. I really don't like what the marketing team tries to tell you, because it dose not exist.

Regarding an approach to learn about AWS, I would start with all the serverless services that they have, since the pricing for most of them is ideal for beginners (WARNING - read the pricing page for each since not all have a free staring plane, like S3 and DynamoDB) and for simple weekend projects.

For example, I did build this project a while ago: https://github.com/0x4447/0x4447_product_s3_email, if you scroll down to the pricing section you will see this:

``` All resources deployed via this stack will potentially cost you money. But you'd have to do the following for this to happen:

- Invoke Lambdas over 1,000,000 times a month - Send and receive over 1000 emails a month - Perform over 10,000 Get and Put operations and over 2000 Delete operations in your S3 Bucket - Exceed 100 build minutes on CodeBuild - $1 per active CodePipeline (must run at least once a month to be considered active)

The only payment you'll encounter from Day One is an S3 storage fee for emails and CodePipeline artifacts. ```

So you can have a stack that is actually doing something very useful that costs not even a $1 a month.

It is possible to pay $0 to AWS, but you need to first understand AWS to be able to do it, another trivial example of a tiny project that is useful and cost $0 to run: https://github.com/0x4447/0x4447_product_secure301

The last point would be: don't listen to the marketing material - they are there to sell you AWS, marketing never cares about reality.

I also recommend this website https://awsvideocatalog.com - pick a service and watch all the keynotes AWS has on that service, if you'd spend 1h a day, in 6 months you'll know more about AWS then anyone else complaining here.