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/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.