Why do you think they’re “lazy”? The point is usually to bait you: “You’ll never guess this one weird trick!”

Here it actually makes some sense. There are _so_ many AWS services. It’s similar to the quiz about AWS service icons that demonstrated that not only are the icons broadly unknown, there are myriad unknown services which further complicates things.

It says existing customers can continue to use the IoT apis, just not new customers.

AWS has been good at leaving deprecated services running for existing customers for a long time. They’re doing that here.

They’re deprecating it for new use cases.

Horizontal or vertical orientation?

I always find the idea that there's something to navigate kind of curious - as you say, its lots of managed versions of open source tools and a mix of proprietary management frameworks on top. Some of what they offer are genuinely unique products for niche use cases, but if you have that niche you probably know what services can support it, like the people in the other comments here mentioning the IoT APIs.

But me (or my teams) are rarely asking the question of "how should I run my service on AWS" in general, its much more typically "I need a managed Postgres database, what AWS product offers that" or "I have an OCI image, what managed platform can I run that in". There might still be a couple of possible answers for those questions, but by the point I arrive there I'm solving for a specific problem.

Especially if you're looking for hobby or toy projects, the differences between vanilla RDS Postgres and Aurora Postgres are probably irrelevant, just pick one which has a free tier you understand.

Its sort of like walking into a kitchen hungry and seeing 3 knives and a stove and oven and a dozen peelers and can openers and being very overwhelmed by all of this until you decide you want to eat a grilled cheese, and then grabbing a skillet to put onto a burner and starting.

From my observations over the years a lot of “services” should literally just be features in stuff that already exists. Like Flink should have just been under MSK instead of the confusing mess it has gone through (first branded as part of Kinesis???)