I'm a longtime user/customer of Amazon Web Services, going all the way back to the beginning when they rolled out S3, their basic storage system.

My main site, scripting.com, is an S3 bucket. I have an EC2 instance that runs a bunch of my apps. I use Route 53 to manage domains. 

I probably would use more of their services, but they're so damned hard to get started with. Which is a shame because once you've climbed the hill, they're not that hard to use.

Typically I have to approach a product several times, often over a period of months, before the clutter gets out of the way, and the steps-to-start reveal themselves.

I'm dealing with that now with the Elastic File System. I was allowed early access to it, but when I looked at the docs, I could tell right off that I would have to learn a lot of extra concepts before I could get to Hello World. Usually it takes a few approaches over months before I break through and discover how to use one of these toolkits. 

They really ought to fix this. 

They need a different kind of doc-writer, someone who develops the docs as you would factor a piece of software. Write down the long step-by-step process, and look for ways to eliminate steps. Iterate, test it with real people, and go back and do it again. Find a path that gets it up and running in a single session. 

And even better if the docs-writing experience could feed back in to the design of the product dashboards, so the defaults could be the easy path into the product., reducing steps in the startup docs. That's how you factor the startup process. Factoring works with docs too. 

Everyone says we should teach kids to code, what if instead we made it so that the machines they're using didn't need so much coding? Amazon really has something here, the way we should all be doing computing in the future, but now it requires people to know too much to get the simple result most people will want. 

PS: I want to acknowledge that they have started to do stuff like what I describe here, in the Lambda product, and in the release of EFS. But there are so many concepts they use that I don't understand, in both products, that's why I have to approach and re-approach. Most of their competitors are no better, btw. The walls are higher than they need to be everywhere.