The AWS APIs are a twisty maze of passages, all [nearly] alike.
The management console is okay if you just want an instance or two, but it still strikes me that AWS is best when you want (or need) to automate allocation of cloud services. Libraries like Python's Boto are great way to get the basics taken care of, like working with S3 and spinning up/shutting down EC2 instances, without having to fret too much about the raw AWS APIs.
Beyond the basics, it's quite common to want to spin up a web of resources (EBS, load balancers, security groups, elastic IPs) along with new EC2 instances. The console isn't ideal for that, but Cloud Formation is fairly good: CFN allows you declare the resources you want and their relationship to one other. Construction is transactional, so you either get a working web or you get nothing. The Cloud Formation syntax is JSON and a little wonky -- there are things like functions to do table lookups so you have some semblance of making choices -- but it's serviceable.
(For sanity we use YAML for Cloud Formation and convert to JSON before sending it up to AWS. JSON lacks comments and sucks to hand-edit on deeply nested structures. Some of our YAML is hand-written; some of it generated by our Fabric scripts.)
The management console is okay if you just want an instance or two, but it still strikes me that AWS is best when you want (or need) to automate allocation of cloud services. Libraries like Python's Boto are great way to get the basics taken care of, like working with S3 and spinning up/shutting down EC2 instances, without having to fret too much about the raw AWS APIs.
Beyond the basics, it's quite common to want to spin up a web of resources (EBS, load balancers, security groups, elastic IPs) along with new EC2 instances. The console isn't ideal for that, but Cloud Formation is fairly good: CFN allows you declare the resources you want and their relationship to one other. Construction is transactional, so you either get a working web or you get nothing. The Cloud Formation syntax is JSON and a little wonky -- there are things like functions to do table lookups so you have some semblance of making choices -- but it's serviceable.
(For sanity we use YAML for Cloud Formation and convert to JSON before sending it up to AWS. JSON lacks comments and sucks to hand-edit on deeply nested structures. Some of our YAML is hand-written; some of it generated by our Fabric scripts.)