> Select a learning path for step-by-step tutorials to get you up and running in less than an hour.
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?
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.
```
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.
Agree with all of this. I think the reason you're getting so much pushback is that you started this conversation with "not sure where the problem is". Clearly you do see the problem - AWS encourages beginners to get going as quickly as possible with these tutorials and the free tier, but then makes it difficult for those users to avoid unexpected charges. They should either stop encouraging beginners, or start offering easy ways to protect yourself.
That statement was related to the sentiment that there is no way to protect yourself or a team of people from AWS pricing, people were implying that there is no tool to help you limit or track expenses, which is not true, since there are plenty of tools to do that.
Anyway, life gose on, and it was overall a good chat :)
> Select a learning path for step-by-step tutorials to get you up and running in less than an hour.
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?