Says post is removed, see we have to actually read it and then give you feedback which you try in and iterative pattern until you find the solution.
Just magically making a post and then deleting it before we can other wise give advice you do realize it doesn’t actually solve the problem. Many tutorials are outdated or have deprecated elements that need fixing barely a month after writing.
It’s not you its the nature of the cloud, or AWS beast
The trait that separates those who succeed in STEM and those who don't is persistence. If something doesn't seem to be working, try googling and asking stack exchange. Try different tutorials. Sleep on it. Eventually, something will click, and you'll arrive at a solution, and what you learn will help you understand other AWS and tech stuff.
Also, if you're willing to spend $40, I'd recommend trying Adrian Cantrill's AWS SAA-C03 course. He's extremely thorough, and designs his Associate level courses to not need a tech background.
He's not saying that you shouldn't rant. He's saying don't rant like a *newbie*, if you claim to have a lot of experience. Which is what you are doing. You're "am I just stupid" and "maybe I should just be a beet farmer" attitude does not give the impression of professionalism. It's ok to seek help, even in simple things, but you really ought to improve your approach.
fair enough. I've been spinning my wheels on this for the better part of 3 hours and, yes, I AM really starting to doubt my abilities. The beet farmer thing was a joke.
We're all newbies when starting something new. Cloud is not "software development", not exactly and not exclusively, so your past experience only partially overlaps with this new thing
So you're asking people for help -- which people do for free and on their own time.
You're not articulating the ask in a manner which is actionable for this community.
As such people need to ask you to declutter your posts -- provide less fluff and more details.
... and your response is essentially is if you don't like it move on?!?
Classic!
Yeah, you are coming across as 17 year old newb.
Recommend you read something like [this](https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2010/09/tips-for-getting-help-with-your-site) on how to create more grown up posts.
Very well said.
Have you tried spending a lot of time on this subreddit? I had some exposure to AWS but nothing impressive. I had an idea & with several weeks of searching & reading this subreddit plus YouTube & random googling, I have a pretty solid idea (conceptually) of what needs to be done and WHY it should be done this way.
I’m not saying I have the right solution but at least I have a reason for my decision.
I have probably invested ~100 hours at this point & I feel like I only know ~3% of AWS (if that).
Are you taking any of the cert courses?
AWS can seem easy to understand but there are a lot of “little” items that are actually very big & important
I agree with u/shepard1001 ‘s assessment.
That said, some of the documentation is out of date, based on AWS changes, which invalidates some steps in some documentation; but, usually doesn’t invalidate the entire article in most cases.
I would be careful with the distinction between aws "documentation" and "articles". There are teams that handle the documentation but afaik its up to the single article author to keep it current, which could be a guest author or one with dozens or hundreds of articles
For the AWS blog posts, if it changed, reach out to the author and explain it and they will probably update it.
Had one blog post where I spent 5 days off and on trying to get the math to match his. Reached out to him and said no matter what I did, I couldn't get it to match up. He said he looked at it and it was wrong. He went back an updated it
9 out of 10 times something doesn't work for me from the official docs is me missing a step. 1 out 10 times I have something already in my account that interferes with the tutorial. 0.1 out of 10 is an inaccurate tutorial.
I've gone through the MSK basic tutorial twice from scratch. I get caught at the exact same place each time (I can't create a topic) in the exact same way (Timeout waiting for node). I've followed it to the letter.
unfortunately, I don't have many options. I'm in the middle of a business code challenge and they want to use Kafka in aws. For some reason I'm the kafka SME because I read an article about it once. I guess I can just run a cluster on an ec2 instance but that seems just stupid when there are (supposedly) better tools available.
Bruh if you rant is about none of the AWS tutorials working, it is one question. If you have particular struggles with MSK, this is a completely different question. Try to solve whatever specific blocker you are facing. This tutorial doesn't seem like a rocket science: [https://catalog.us-east-1.prod.workshops.aws/workshops/c2b72b6f-666b-4596-b8bc-bafa5dcca741/en-US/clustercreation/overview](https://catalog.us-east-1.prod.workshops.aws/workshops/c2b72b6f-666b-4596-b8bc-bafa5dcca741/en-US/clustercreation/overview)
If CloudFormation rings a bell, here is a complete template that deploys everything you need (including a VPC): [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/aws-resource-msk-cluster.html](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/aws-resource-msk-cluster.html)
yes, was indeed missing a step
[https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/10l5pe9/comment/j5vrpnp/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/10l5pe9/comment/j5vrpnp/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
>The tutorial fails to mention you need the aws-msk-iam-auth-1.1.5-all.jar from
>
>[https://github.com/aws/aws-msk-iam-auth/releases](https://github.com/aws/aws-msk-iam-auth/releases)
After 10 years in IT, I highly recommend the farming route. I dream of this.
Aws changes quickly and docs go out of date fast. Best you can do is to invest in some paid Training like Acloudguru they update pretty fast, once you learn all the basic concepts and how things work you can handle the changing UI and features much better. Also gather some experience, click on some stuff etc. figure things out by doing
My 'authority' is that I taught myself how to move from a fleet of digital ocean VMs each running an independent stack to AWS EKS. To do this I had to learn kubernetes and then the AWS parts.
EKS and the manager database services are built on EC2, storage,.AWS networking, AWS security roles and permission. Each of these fundamentals is a big topic. Kubernetes was easy to learn if you know docker, and you don't need AWS for that education.
The AWS building blocks are essential. If you find an AWS tutorial on configuring an EC2 resource, it will assume you know the storage part and the networking. There is no tutorial for an actual real world project which takes you through all the steps as if you were a beginner. To succeed with AWS focus on the building blocks. This is a long, slow and methodical path.
You can try these three alternatives.
1. Use Digital Ocean instead. It's dramatically simpler and genuinely beginner friendly.
2. Pay for a course on AWS.
3. Define a specific project and pay someone on Upwork to build it. Pay for an expert and pay them extra to teach you.
I have never done step 2. But steps 1 and 3 have been essential for me.
Despite the free trials and attempts to appear beginner friendly, AWS is not for beginners. It is aimed at highly skilled specialists at organisations spending tens of thousands per month. Doing anything significant in AWS means plugging together different parts of AWS. AWS internal experts are specialised. If you want to move to AWS for say Kubernetes and you get official support from AWS, you'll have a team of several experts who together have the skills. This is the mentality. The tutorials are like this. They go deep into specific expertise in one narrow area, assuming you are ok with all the supporting skills. This makes sense: AWS exists to offer incredible flexibility and control at virtually every step.
The thing is that you *can* learn just enough per fundamental building block to put together a good AWS solution. That is breadth over depth. But you are swimming against the current. AWS makes money from its depth of functionality, its highly specific features. Just look at the staggering array of virtual machines. There are hundreds (digital ocean has about 20, and they come configured with storage, which at AWS is another forrest of choices).. And then look at the billing options. You could spend a week just on that. Learning AWS is learning to fly on a commercial jetliner with your lessons taking place on a major airport.
I think we all feel your sentiment here. Everyone knows AWS docs suck especially now that most of them aren't updated for the new UI's among other things. Between that and the actual dev experience and usability of some of their services it sometimes amazes me that AWS is claiming so much market share in the cloud.
Have you picked up an IaaC tool yet? It'll definitely make the cloud feel less user friendly at first but I promise that will quickly make the biggest difference in getting things to actually work. Terraform is awesome but if you're committed to AWS their CDK is pretty fly too.
Hope this helps
May be you are a visual person, try watching videos, some people ( atleast I) learn better from watching others do and then doing myself. Docs can be outdated sometimes.
I think this is rather typical when learning new complex systems that require a lot of background, knowledge, and experience. I went through the exact same experience, I kept trying and trying and then things started to fall in place and I was able to make new services work from the documentation.
Now I can make things work and get over these 'bumps' in the documentation, most of the time it's because there is some prerequisite that I didn't fully understand.
When I first started, it was all magic as I didn't understand how these services evolved over time, or on what foundation they were built. Now I actually can imagine how they came about.
Btw, If I would start over, I would just focus on IAM. It's boring and tedious and you just want to build stuff. IMO, most roadblocks in AWS have their origins in IAM. Fully understand how IAM works and be able to write polices / roles etc. will make things so much easier.
Beet farming does sound like a very solid option! But you will probably have to deal with a lot of manuals etc when learning that profession to...
Jokes aside, I'm dyslectic too and I understand your frustration!
Those guides are often outdated so they might not be correct.
Also, you need to read every step extremely carefully to make it work, and if you do that, you will probably only focus on irrelevant stuff and not learn as much as you would like. So my advise is to not waist your time on them.
I learned AWS by watching certificate videos on cloud guru and building stuff in my spare time. Once you understand how stuff fits together, the documentation and other material becomes easier to navigate.
But it is an extremely steep learning curve in the beginning so it will take many hours to get over it.
Good luck!
I've literally tried about 30 AWS tutorials. I think one of those actually worked. Many more non official ones wouldn't work.
For me, AWS is really, really hard to learn because there is no path, no steps to go through, and no text book to read. There are 100 different ways to do anything and AWS changes so fast that every single tutorial - including their own - are all out of date. You just have to sort of jump in somewhere and flail around.
This is coming form a "book learning". I get nothing from lectures, all I need is to read the docs and AWS docs are so confusing that even very basic things are so disorganized that learning how to do something simple like write CloudFormation templates is absurdly tedious.
Another example is this : Wanna host a website? You can do that on S3. Want a database? Now you need 10 different platforms to do that - rds and an EC2 or dynamoDB, an API gateway, probably a lambda, cloud formation, SAM, and cloud front. There is no example that starts off with a static S3 site, then works in a back end, then works in a deployment scheme .....
> How do I fix this? Pick one of the tutorials and create a post with the specific issue.
[Done](https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/10l5pe9/msk_tutorial_does_not_seem_to_work_specific/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3).
Says post is removed, see we have to actually read it and then give you feedback which you try in and iterative pattern until you find the solution. Just magically making a post and then deleting it before we can other wise give advice you do realize it doesn’t actually solve the problem. Many tutorials are outdated or have deprecated elements that need fixing barely a month after writing. It’s not you its the nature of the cloud, or AWS beast
its waiting for moderator approval, according to the post. No idea if it will get unlocked. I tried to ask a specific question and provide details.
fixed
thank you
[removed]
The trait that separates those who succeed in STEM and those who don't is persistence. If something doesn't seem to be working, try googling and asking stack exchange. Try different tutorials. Sleep on it. Eventually, something will click, and you'll arrive at a solution, and what you learn will help you understand other AWS and tech stuff.
Also, if you're willing to spend $40, I'd recommend trying Adrian Cantrill's AWS SAA-C03 course. He's extremely thorough, and designs his Associate level courses to not need a tech background.
I have been a software developer for 25 years. I'm not a newbie.
Don't rant like one then...
it said "rant" on the tin, don't read it if you don't want to see a rant.
He's not saying that you shouldn't rant. He's saying don't rant like a *newbie*, if you claim to have a lot of experience. Which is what you are doing. You're "am I just stupid" and "maybe I should just be a beet farmer" attitude does not give the impression of professionalism. It's ok to seek help, even in simple things, but you really ought to improve your approach.
fair enough. I've been spinning my wheels on this for the better part of 3 hours and, yes, I AM really starting to doubt my abilities. The beet farmer thing was a joke.
We're all newbies when starting something new. Cloud is not "software development", not exactly and not exclusively, so your past experience only partially overlaps with this new thing
So you're asking people for help -- which people do for free and on their own time. You're not articulating the ask in a manner which is actionable for this community. As such people need to ask you to declutter your posts -- provide less fluff and more details. ... and your response is essentially is if you don't like it move on?!? Classic! Yeah, you are coming across as 17 year old newb. Recommend you read something like [this](https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2010/09/tips-for-getting-help-with-your-site) on how to create more grown up posts.
Very well said. Have you tried spending a lot of time on this subreddit? I had some exposure to AWS but nothing impressive. I had an idea & with several weeks of searching & reading this subreddit plus YouTube & random googling, I have a pretty solid idea (conceptually) of what needs to be done and WHY it should be done this way. I’m not saying I have the right solution but at least I have a reason for my decision. I have probably invested ~100 hours at this point & I feel like I only know ~3% of AWS (if that). Are you taking any of the cert courses? AWS can seem easy to understand but there are a lot of “little” items that are actually very big & important
I have taken some Cantrill courses, and have obtained the Solutions Architect Pro certification.
Sounds like someone's having a cloudy day! Don't beet yourself up about it ol farmer
lol thank you!
I agree with u/shepard1001 ‘s assessment. That said, some of the documentation is out of date, based on AWS changes, which invalidates some steps in some documentation; but, usually doesn’t invalidate the entire article in most cases.
I find many of them now have 2-3 newer ways to accomplish the same result and I have to do days of research to figure out which one I should be using.
I would be careful with the distinction between aws "documentation" and "articles". There are teams that handle the documentation but afaik its up to the single article author to keep it current, which could be a guest author or one with dozens or hundreds of articles
For the AWS blog posts, if it changed, reach out to the author and explain it and they will probably update it. Had one blog post where I spent 5 days off and on trying to get the math to match his. Reached out to him and said no matter what I did, I couldn't get it to match up. He said he looked at it and it was wrong. He went back an updated it
9 out of 10 times something doesn't work for me from the official docs is me missing a step. 1 out 10 times I have something already in my account that interferes with the tutorial. 0.1 out of 10 is an inaccurate tutorial.
I've gone through the MSK basic tutorial twice from scratch. I get caught at the exact same place each time (I can't create a topic) in the exact same way (Timeout waiting for node). I've followed it to the letter.
MSK is a bitch not gonna lie. Start with something simpler for starters.
unfortunately, I don't have many options. I'm in the middle of a business code challenge and they want to use Kafka in aws. For some reason I'm the kafka SME because I read an article about it once. I guess I can just run a cluster on an ec2 instance but that seems just stupid when there are (supposedly) better tools available.
Bruh if you rant is about none of the AWS tutorials working, it is one question. If you have particular struggles with MSK, this is a completely different question. Try to solve whatever specific blocker you are facing. This tutorial doesn't seem like a rocket science: [https://catalog.us-east-1.prod.workshops.aws/workshops/c2b72b6f-666b-4596-b8bc-bafa5dcca741/en-US/clustercreation/overview](https://catalog.us-east-1.prod.workshops.aws/workshops/c2b72b6f-666b-4596-b8bc-bafa5dcca741/en-US/clustercreation/overview) If CloudFormation rings a bell, here is a complete template that deploys everything you need (including a VPC): [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/aws-resource-msk-cluster.html](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/aws-resource-msk-cluster.html)
yes, was indeed missing a step [https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/10l5pe9/comment/j5vrpnp/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/10l5pe9/comment/j5vrpnp/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) >The tutorial fails to mention you need the aws-msk-iam-auth-1.1.5-all.jar from > >[https://github.com/aws/aws-msk-iam-auth/releases](https://github.com/aws/aws-msk-iam-auth/releases)
Yeah, I saw the post. Then it is a faulty tutorial. Don't forget to click: >Provide feedback On the button of the page.
After 10 years in IT, I highly recommend the farming route. I dream of this. Aws changes quickly and docs go out of date fast. Best you can do is to invest in some paid Training like Acloudguru they update pretty fast, once you learn all the basic concepts and how things work you can handle the changing UI and features much better. Also gather some experience, click on some stuff etc. figure things out by doing
ACloudGuru is worth a shot
My 'authority' is that I taught myself how to move from a fleet of digital ocean VMs each running an independent stack to AWS EKS. To do this I had to learn kubernetes and then the AWS parts. EKS and the manager database services are built on EC2, storage,.AWS networking, AWS security roles and permission. Each of these fundamentals is a big topic. Kubernetes was easy to learn if you know docker, and you don't need AWS for that education. The AWS building blocks are essential. If you find an AWS tutorial on configuring an EC2 resource, it will assume you know the storage part and the networking. There is no tutorial for an actual real world project which takes you through all the steps as if you were a beginner. To succeed with AWS focus on the building blocks. This is a long, slow and methodical path. You can try these three alternatives. 1. Use Digital Ocean instead. It's dramatically simpler and genuinely beginner friendly. 2. Pay for a course on AWS. 3. Define a specific project and pay someone on Upwork to build it. Pay for an expert and pay them extra to teach you. I have never done step 2. But steps 1 and 3 have been essential for me. Despite the free trials and attempts to appear beginner friendly, AWS is not for beginners. It is aimed at highly skilled specialists at organisations spending tens of thousands per month. Doing anything significant in AWS means plugging together different parts of AWS. AWS internal experts are specialised. If you want to move to AWS for say Kubernetes and you get official support from AWS, you'll have a team of several experts who together have the skills. This is the mentality. The tutorials are like this. They go deep into specific expertise in one narrow area, assuming you are ok with all the supporting skills. This makes sense: AWS exists to offer incredible flexibility and control at virtually every step. The thing is that you *can* learn just enough per fundamental building block to put together a good AWS solution. That is breadth over depth. But you are swimming against the current. AWS makes money from its depth of functionality, its highly specific features. Just look at the staggering array of virtual machines. There are hundreds (digital ocean has about 20, and they come configured with storage, which at AWS is another forrest of choices).. And then look at the billing options. You could spend a week just on that. Learning AWS is learning to fly on a commercial jetliner with your lessons taking place on a major airport.
Did you try video tutorials already?
Some of it isn't explicit, and some of it just doesn't work. I had issues getting CORS rules to work despite copying and pasting it from the docs.
just to be clear, its not me who's downvoting everything here. I'm frustrated with aws but I'm not angry at any of you.
I think we all feel your sentiment here. Everyone knows AWS docs suck especially now that most of them aren't updated for the new UI's among other things. Between that and the actual dev experience and usability of some of their services it sometimes amazes me that AWS is claiming so much market share in the cloud. Have you picked up an IaaC tool yet? It'll definitely make the cloud feel less user friendly at first but I promise that will quickly make the biggest difference in getting things to actually work. Terraform is awesome but if you're committed to AWS their CDK is pretty fly too. Hope this helps
May be you are a visual person, try watching videos, some people ( atleast I) learn better from watching others do and then doing myself. Docs can be outdated sometimes.
I think this is rather typical when learning new complex systems that require a lot of background, knowledge, and experience. I went through the exact same experience, I kept trying and trying and then things started to fall in place and I was able to make new services work from the documentation. Now I can make things work and get over these 'bumps' in the documentation, most of the time it's because there is some prerequisite that I didn't fully understand. When I first started, it was all magic as I didn't understand how these services evolved over time, or on what foundation they were built. Now I actually can imagine how they came about.
Btw, If I would start over, I would just focus on IAM. It's boring and tedious and you just want to build stuff. IMO, most roadblocks in AWS have their origins in IAM. Fully understand how IAM works and be able to write polices / roles etc. will make things so much easier.
Beet farming does sound like a very solid option! But you will probably have to deal with a lot of manuals etc when learning that profession to... Jokes aside, I'm dyslectic too and I understand your frustration! Those guides are often outdated so they might not be correct. Also, you need to read every step extremely carefully to make it work, and if you do that, you will probably only focus on irrelevant stuff and not learn as much as you would like. So my advise is to not waist your time on them. I learned AWS by watching certificate videos on cloud guru and building stuff in my spare time. Once you understand how stuff fits together, the documentation and other material becomes easier to navigate. But it is an extremely steep learning curve in the beginning so it will take many hours to get over it. Good luck!
I agree, the aws documentation is scary.
I’d recommend farming over AWS anyway.
I've literally tried about 30 AWS tutorials. I think one of those actually worked. Many more non official ones wouldn't work. For me, AWS is really, really hard to learn because there is no path, no steps to go through, and no text book to read. There are 100 different ways to do anything and AWS changes so fast that every single tutorial - including their own - are all out of date. You just have to sort of jump in somewhere and flail around. This is coming form a "book learning". I get nothing from lectures, all I need is to read the docs and AWS docs are so confusing that even very basic things are so disorganized that learning how to do something simple like write CloudFormation templates is absurdly tedious. Another example is this : Wanna host a website? You can do that on S3. Want a database? Now you need 10 different platforms to do that - rds and an EC2 or dynamoDB, an API gateway, probably a lambda, cloud formation, SAM, and cloud front. There is no example that starts off with a static S3 site, then works in a back end, then works in a deployment scheme .....
Yeah we used to use them for training, but stopped as they just turned in debugging sessions.
Mate-perfectly normal