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Proposal: AWS

I feel as though an AWS board would be too specific, while a board focused around Cloud Platforms in general would be better. This would allow it to include discussions from Google's and even Microsoft's platforms. They all use very similar technologies, only in slightly different ways.

I also think that AWS would be a topic covered by https://serverfault.com/

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  • There is absolutely nothing about AWS as a single category that is too narrow a focus. The vast spectrum of available services combined with the overwhelming complexity of deploying those services to build out a cloud architecture demands it's own board. AWS questions on ServerFault go mostly unanswered. We definitely need a community based alternative to expensive AWS support. An active community board like this would provide a more critical perspective on strengths/weaknesses and provide better solutions to cloud infrastructure problems.
    – Threadid
    Aug 23 '16 at 2:04
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I agree with the opinion that this proposal is too specific. Not only within the IT world but even for Cloud Services in general.

I've seen examples of questions here that could be asked directly to AWS support. If this proposal ends up being a community, I would be surprised as it will become one of the first (if not the first) communities focused entirely in a commercial solution.

AWS uses to be managed by DevOps people. I suggest you move your effort to support the DevOps community instead (http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/97295/devops), which it is an area of expertise and includes AWS among many other related practices.

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  • AWS Support — at least for the Alexa Skills Kit and other Echo features — do not take technical cases from developers unless they have upgraded their account. Hence, developers are forced to rely on AWS forums which (at least in my experience) doesn't have an active community, has trivial questions that are often duplicated, no filtering system, etc. AWS devs are often slow to address the issues posed in the forums. If there was a SX community for this, it might prompt AWS staff to step up their game wrt customer service.
    – Lame-Ov2.0
    Aug 3 '16 at 20:05
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Given how much infrastructure is run on AWS now and how its relatively specialised I don't see how its a problem.

AWS is highly technical and would lend itself to specific answers that would help bring this knowledge together.

There are already a number of highly specific sites that focus on individual and would be no worse than the multitude of CMS or single-software specific sites:

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Certainly, having AWS is specific, since StackOverflow has tag aws (synonym of amazon-web-services) and is nearing 28K questions already. So it is possible that this proposal would tend to drain audience from an existing Stack Exchange site.

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I joined StackOverflow two years ago and have gained 12K reputation only answering a small subset of AWS questions. There are clearly many AWS questions on SO across a wide range of technologies (compute, networking, coding, security, etc).

The biggest problem is that many questions on SO get voted down because they aren't "programming" questions. However, very few AWS questions get asked/answered on ServerFault.

So:

  • It's definitely a wide-ranging topic
  • It has many active users who ask and answer questions
  • It isn't well-suited to SO

Some people fear that moving to a different system would drain SO users. This should actually be a reason to move, since it is clearly an active topic that will only grow in future.

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There are certainly enough good questions specific to AWS to go around... enough that I managed to earn an golden dupe hammer gold tag badge on SO despite the fact that I have no affiliation with Amazon and have been answering questions on the topic for no better reason than the fact that I find much of AWS useful, well-engineered, and interesting.

Yes, it could potentially, arguably, drain some audience from Stack Overflow... but more often than not, the AWS questions on SO are not quite right for SO.

Many AWS questions -- including some of my most-upvoted answers, of all time -- like Why do we need private subnets in VPC? (+133) and What is the difference between an A Record Alias and CNAME in Route 53? (+46) are questions that were asked and answered on Stack Overflow -- but they're really not "programming" questions, so they really don't belong on Stack Overflow... and yet they're not obviously Server Fault material, either... and they are more advanced than what you would expect to find on Super User.

These questions could have been migrated here, if they hadn't been asked here initially. (Assuming "here" had been a thing, of course).

The point is well taken that "DevOps" might also be a logical place for such questions, but AWS really is its own ecosystem and a Stack Exchange community built around it makes sense: many of the questions that come to mind are indeed specific to AWS, not "the cloud" in general, and there are certainly communities with far narrower scopes than this.

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I agree AWS is so complex solution, but in one place be nice to get at last basic help with this system.

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