That is exactly it, except sometimes you're editing or copy-pastaing JSON instead of YAML.
I've often assumed that no one's KPIs are tied to making things more usable or docs more readable, and everyone's KPIs are tied to shipping new features.
As an AWS employee on the container services team one of my KPI's is definitely making things more usable. Have you seen the AWS Cloud Development Kit? (https://github.com/aws/aws-cdk) It is a more powerful infrastructure as code framework that can docker build, docker push, and run an AWS Fargate task with just a few lines of declarative TypeScript or Python code. You can see some examples here in the "ecs-patterns" module: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/api/latest/docs/aws-ecs-patt...
In general I'd say that AWS takes the approach of offering a lot of configurability if you need to tweak things. You can go into that low level JSON or YAML if you want, but we are also providing higher level tools like AWS CDK which do the work for you, and let you just focus on building your app with just a few lines of code.
I'd say that the referenced tutorial is aimed at being "mid level". It abstracts some things but still shows a lot of the lower level settings you can tweak directly. If you want a more abstracted, higher level getting started experience you should start with a tutorial for a higher level tool like AWS Cloud Development Kit, and use that to automatically setup and deploy to AWS Fargate under the hood.
If you (or anyone else reading this) have any specific feedback on things you want to see made more usable, or docs that aren't readable feel free to email me using the address in my HN profile.
Thanks for making the cdk! It’s awesome. Would love docs / examples on how to connect to aurora serverless from fargate with secrets in kms. Also, auto rotating certificates for the load balancer. And lastly, a fully functional ci/cd pipeline with staging/prod and backfilling aurora serverless from prod->staging, and also how to import data into aurora serverless from a postgres dump, and how to get aurora serverless data copied to a local postgres. Thanks!
I've often assumed that no one's KPIs are tied to making things more usable or docs more readable, and everyone's KPIs are tied to shipping new features.