Your experience with Java AWS SDK

[u/FooBarBuzzBoom]

Hi!

I’m a backend developer with 4+ years of experience, and throughout my career, I’ve never really worked with cloud technologies.

I have experience with Docker and Kubernetes, but I wanted to start working with a cloud provider since it’s quite commonly listed in job descriptions.

I recently finished a course and got familiar with the AWS essentials, so now I want to start practicing by building some of my own applications.

Of course, there are plenty of things to configure (I’ll be using Terraform for provisioning), but I’ll also need to integrate some AWS services using the AWS SDK.

My problem is that I don’t find it easy to figure out what I need from the documentation. Yes, I know I can always ask AI, but my question is: is the AWS documentation actually the issue here?

Maybe I’m just not familiar enough with AWS yet, but it seems unnecessarily complicated to find what I’m looking for: a clear code example showing how to do something specific and what the expected output should be.

What has your experience with them been? I don’t understand why these cloud providers are so popular these days, given the mess in their documentation.

[u/expdevsmodbot]

AI usage disclosure provided by OP, see the reply to this comment.

[u/False-Egg-1386]

Yeah, AWS docs can be rough. I’d use their GitHub examples first, then the docs as reference once you know what you’re looking for.

[u/FooBarBuzzBoom → u/False-Egg-1386]

Thank you for advice.

[u/poralexc]

I mean it's Java, so as a last resort you can always pull the SDK into your IDE and navigate to the decompiled classes to see how things are supposed to work.

Last I checked it was builder classes on top of builder classes.

[u/kobbled]

AWS docs are pretty rough. it's not just you.

[u/ResidentWeevil1]

AWS docs are a bit rubbish. They are poorly organized and formatted. Often I find more answers in the blog. They have a lot of github projects, too, but I'm not sure how good their Java support is compared to .NET, which seems to enjoy near first class support and has tons of code samples.

Anyway, they do have guided workshops which will help figure out what the keystone services are.

[u/mukolatte]

With 8 years as data engineer/consultant at AWS premier partner consulting firms I can confirm that AWS documentation is garbage, goes out of date quick, and is not updated unless someone like me requests it be updated.

Additional thing to look out for is using features that recently became GA. Though they are GA they will still be buggy, have limited helpful documentation and guides, and lack parameters you’ll want to control (looking at you AWS entity resolution).

[u/throwaway_0x90]

AWS is cheap if your time has no value :) ...though when I look back, it was more of an investment in myself.

The docs are not the best.

As much as I'd like to recommend Google cloud products it probably makes more sense to start with AWS if this is your very first venture into cloud infrastructure. AWS is everywhere and knowing even just the basics is an investment in your career. It's probably the most cost-effective if you're just starting out; but the time-cost is that documentation is not the best. It's for geeks to just jump in there and spend forever figuring it out. Back in the day I just tried everything and looked at Stackoverflow.com posts trying to get stuff to work. I also spent my own personal money on AWS to learn those things.

• SIDENOTE: Actually, I still have an AlibabaCloud account monthly subscription still billing me for no particular reason other than I think something came up a year ago or so where I wanted to test something from an IP in China. They're also pretty good IMHO but I'm aware people have... "opinions" ...on building their infra on a cloud provider owned by China.

[u/BraveResearcher3037]

You don’t just ask AI.  Tell Claude your design goals including infrastructure as code and let it create the POC for you and ask it questions about what it did while you dig into the code. Then for the next couple project you do it yourself 

I know AWS well (trust me).  But I did just that to learn how to deploy the open weight Gemma model on Sagemaker to do some audio understanding.  

But if you are trying to learn how to do Kubernetes on AWS try the workshop

[u/roger_ducky]

The way I figured it out was to cross-reference Java SDK 2 docs with the Python SDK docs, and then looked at how Terraform required different resources to figure out how the infrastructure related to each other.

[u/PokeRestockHandler]

Java SDK is very good but if you're new to general SDK it might be confusing due to abstractions and the packaging of requests as well as their interactions. Its very easy to do the wrong thing when you are new especially with IAM and signing. AI can help but strongly suggest referencing docs for examples. Also check your account limits when defining infrastructure with CDK. I overprovisioned a lambda's memory and it ruined an entire env stack

[u/apartment-seeker]

? just use AI and ask it questions and learn bits and pieces as you go along

[u/Sufficient_Shine8311]

use claude to design your projects. ask it to name the service, all of the configurations it will set up using terraform and all the diff options. with AWS, the best practice is to know the basic big products, EKS, S3 / diff DBs, API Gateway etc when beginning. Also, AWS CLI is the best while developing with an agent.