[kolev]

One painful to learn issue with AWS is the limits of services, which some of them are not so obvious. Everything has a hard limit and unless you have the support plan, it can take you days and weeks to get those lifted. They are all handled by the respective departments and lifted (or rejected) one by one. Many times we've encountered a Security Group limit right before a production push or other similar things. Last, but not least, RDS and CloudFront are extremely painful to launch. I have many incidents where RDS was taking nearly 2 hours to launch - blank multi-AZ instance! CloudFront distributions take 30 minutes to complete. I hate those two taking so long as my CloudFormation templates pretty much take an excess of an hour due to the blocking RDS and CloudFront. Last, but not least - VPC is nice, I love it, but it takes time to get what's the difference between Network ACL and Security groups and especially - why the neck do you need to run NATs?! Why isn't this part of the service?! They provide some outdated "high" availability scripts, which are, in fact, buggy, and support only 2 AZs. Also, a CloudFront "flush" takes over 20 minutes - even for empty distributions! Also, you can't do a hot switch from on distribution to another as it also take 30 minutes to change a CNAME and you cannot have two distributions having the same CNAME (it's a weird edge case scenario, but anyway).

[kolev]

Just recalled another big annoyance! CloudFormation allows you to store JSON files in the user data, which is a bit similar to CloudInit, but... it turns your numbers into strings! So, imagine you need to put some JSON config file in there and the software expect an integer and craps out if there's a string value instead. I won't even bring how limited and behind the API CloudFormation is... Even their AWS CLI is behind and doesn't support major services like CloudFront. They even removed the nice landing page of the CLI took, which made it very obvious which services are NOT supported - I guess they just got embarrassed by having so many unsupported ones!