5 Things Nobody Tells You About Deploying to AWS for the First Time

Lessons from Week 4 of the AWS Summer Builder Cohort 2026

Everyone tells you AWS is powerful. Everyone tells you it's the industry standard. Nobody tells you about the 45 minutes you'll spend staring at an AccessDeniedException wondering why your Lambda can't talk to your own DynamoDB table.

This week, my team deployed our Intelligent Polling System to AWS for the first time — and we learned more from the things that went wrong than from the things that went right. Here are 5 honest lessons from our first real AWS deployment.

IAM Will Humble You Immediately

Before this week, IAM was that thing we knew was important but hadn't really needed to deal with. After this week, we understand why the entire cloud security session was dedicated to it.