My current favorites on AWS, in no particular order:

1. IAM and policies. I’m not convinced that anyone knows how IAM rules and policy rules interact. There’s a flow chart that appears to be incomplete. There is not obviously a complete enough spec that one could, say, write a test suite to confirm that the actual behavior follows the spec. LLMs, of course, don’t know either because the training data does not exist.

2. Utter nonsense pricing. The cost of listing an S3 bucket goes up by an order of magnitude if you set the default storage class to archive despite this having nothing whatsoever to do with the operation in question. (But GCS adds two orders of magnitude for the same offense.) Conclusion: NEVER EVER set your default storage class to an archive tier.

3. Boto. It’s an Unbelievable Piece Of Crap. It’s not a library at all — it’s a meta-library that generates itself at runtime because someone had fun doing that and because Python didn’t stop them. Python type checkers, of course, just give up. And Boto is, um, a community project that AWS claims not to care about. Which is, of course, why its maintainers refused to fix an interop bug with GCS (I fully documented the entire bug for them, and the fix would have been the removal of a bit of pointless code).

4. Egress pricing. And the way it multiplies if you use any advanced VPC features. Why on Earth is it cheaper to sent an object to S3 from my own machine than to send the same object to the same endpoint from within a different AWS region nearby?

5. Authentication. It’s so bad that they invented Identity Center to try to unsuck it. But if you use Identity Center you get logged out even while actively using the console, and you get a helpful link to the WRONG PLACE to sign back in. Because of course core AWS isn’t even aware that Identity Center exists.

I don’t even use AWS very much. I’m sure I would fall in love with more of it if I did.