AWS services to avoid
Cognito:yes, its a complex poorly documented pile of shite. BUT. It does work as a reasonably secure OAUTH2 thingamebob. However I was told by my AWS account manager that auth0 was the way forward, and I agree.Cloudformation:Meh, I have about 35k lines of active CF at the moment. Its much of a muchness. Unless you are using parameters with selectors, you are going to have a bad time. Hard linking templates together (I assume thats what nested stacks are) is terrible. I've only briefly used terraform, so I have no idea if its much better.CF _could be_ a lot better. Like compile time validation, not just in time. that would stop a lot of anger when you realise you've spelt a CF parameter wrong(or the value fails validation) but only after you've spent ten minutes for it to spin up. Thats frankly unforgivable.Elasticache:Yes. Its expensive.KINESIS:What a disappointment. Stupid naming conventions, Terrible throttling and throughput. Its just horrific. Whats worse is that they looked at SQS and thought: "this compares favouribly" NATS.io is a great fit for certain usecases (no, kafka is never the answer)LAmbda:I don't actually get this myself. I made a REST api exclusively in lambda. It meant that I could build a working prototype really quickly. Once proven we ported it to fastapi in an autoscale group.The API gateway was heavily integrated into the lambda spinup (controlled in CF) so I really don't see what the issue it. Also it understands swagger, so I struggle to understand the criticism