[jthrowsitaway]

Totally agree. It's been a few years since I used AWS, but back then they shipped half -assed products that didn't have a consistent feel with the rest of their products and weren't feature complete out of the box.

I remember using their email service (SES) and wanting to read logs for emails that have been sent. The only option was to point log events at an SQS queue. So, you had to create one of those, assign proper roles and access controls, etc. After that, you need to dump or consume the queue somehow. I can't remember if SQS could dump to S3, but if it could, then OK: create a bucket, assign roles, etc. Now, to parse the S3 bucket contents somehow... Wait, what was I doing? Trying to read some damn log files or set up a Rube Goldberg machine for the log files?

I get it. It's a modular system, and that can be very powerful. Sometimes I just want to do something simple without going down a multi-hour (or day) rabbit hole. The inability to perform simple actions on AWS without looping in tons of their other products means indefinite job security for a lot of people. IaC and templates for actions like the above alleviate this a bit, but it's still a dreary landscape.

[rco8786]

Your experience with emails and logs is how I feel every time I try to do anything with AWS as well.

[dublin]

The important thing to understand about AWS (or Azure or GCP, for that matter) is that you're not eliminating learning how to deploy and use an OS underneath your apps, you're just using a different (sometimes better/easier, but always more proprietary) KIND of OS. Because that's what these cloud platforms are - replacements for the OS in the modern distributed world.

They can offer awesome leverage and benefit. They can also be horrible traps that can break a company. I've seen both. As Doug Comer once told me, Unix is a Power Tool. Power Tools can kill. So can cloud platforms. There is nothing new under the sun...