I'd personally love it if AWS implemented a digital ocean-like "basic" interface which, realistically, covers 90% of startups' needs. Simple is good. If needed, they can switch over to "Fortune 500 mode" later.
"Hey Joe, the app you built for Goldberg Partners uses AWS right?"
"Yeah."
"What does it do on AWS again? Store some files?"
"Yeah, and a load balancer in front of a few containers that handle thumbnail generation for those images. Pretty standard stuff."
"I see. What was their pricing like?"
"Last time I checked, the billing page said something like $0.023 per GB for the first 50 TB or something like that, and $0.0116 per hour for the containers. I don't remember the load balancer pricing, but it should be pretty cheap, we don't have that much stuff on there."
"Interesting, okay. Can you explain why they sent us a bill for $10,372.77?"
Have you looked at Amazon Lightsail? It might be closer to what you're after.
They may be so lean they exclusively run lambda jobs and host from S3. This is a 24 hour learning curve.
Usually when I’m getting into a new area of aws I try to find what they’ve built the technology with. Then I try to go get a good base in that technology, then figure out what AWS has done and understand why/reasoning. This also helps alleviate common concerns about only learning some aws stack. Learn both things, one might one day become less relevant, the other will help you build solid base understandings that last longer.
