AWS Amplify is Surprising
Holy crap, AWS Amplify is cool. What I mean by that in particular is that it really makes setting up a static site easy and that's pleasantly surprising to me.
AWS is not exactly new to me and neither are the technologies behind it (even though it might seem otherwise given I'm geeking out over a two year old technology). I've worked with S3, Cloudfront and other bits of AWS over the past few years. I know enough of AWS that I figured I could setup a static site if I gave it the time. Given my past experience though, I thought I would need about an hour to setup a rough version of it (S3 bucket, Cloudfront, Route 53, etc). Wow, was I wrong. Total setup was about 15 minutes.
That setup time is what totally surprised me. Prior to this experience, I thought only Netlify, Firebase or maybe Heroku would have that fast return on time invested. The fact that you can do this with AWS without really sacrificing all the modularity is incredible.
I've never been a big fan of AWS. I've always been fond of other cloud services like Google's App Engine or Digital Ocean's Droplets and other services. But even I have to admit that with features like this, it's really hard to make arguments for using other cloud providers.
(Shoot - this is really out of date now)