There's so much tribal knowledge when working with cloud providers that you don't get from the docs. As a new user at AWS, ElasticBeanstalk might seem like the perfect solution based on the docs, but ask anyone who's got experience and they'll probably tell you to avoid it.

You, of course, won't figure this out until you've worked with it for a month and start to find all the issues on your own. By then you may be entrenched enough that the switching cost isn't worth it.

I just learned this the hard way with Azure App Service vs. Azure Container Instance. The latter is clearly the more modern solution. I don't know the Azure ecosystem, so when I saw App Service is for running containers, I assumed that was what I should be using.

On AWS you can run code on EC2, ElasticBeanstalk, ECS (EC2 or Fargate), EKR, Lambda, LightSail, and probably a few others I've missed. How do decide as a new user? When kicking the tires might be a week-long process or more, this becomes a huge undertaking.