How to: Please help!
**This is an early in-progress draft!** It’s our first attempt at assembling this information, so is far from comprehensive still, and likely to have omissions or errors.

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Please help by [**joining the Slack channel**](http://slackhatesthe.cloud) (we like to talk about AWS in general, even if you only have questions — discussion helps the community and guides improvements) and [**contributing to the guide**](CONTRIBUTING.md). This guide is *open to contributions*, so unlike a blog, it can keep improving. Like any open source effort, we combine efforts but also review to ensure high quality.

Scope
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-	Currently, this guide covers selected “core” services, such as EC2, S3, Load Balancers, EBS, and IAM, and partial details and tips around other services. We expect it to expand.
-	It is not a tutorial, but rather a collection of information you can read and return to. It is for both beginners and the experienced.
-	The goal of this guide is to be:
	-	**Brief:** Keep it dense and use links
	-	**Practical:** Basic facts, concrete details, advice, gotchas, and other “folk knowledge”
	-	**Current:** We can keep updating it, and anyone can contribute improvements
	-	**Thoughtful:** The goal is to be helpful rather than present dry facts. Thoughtful opinion with rationale is welcome. Suggestions, notes, and opinions based on real experience can be extremely valuable. (We believe this is both possible with a guide of this format, unlike in some [other venues](http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/201994/is-there-a-place-to-ask-opinion-based-questions).)
-	This guide is not sponsored by AWS or AWS-affiliated vendors. It is written by and for engineers who use AWS.

Legend
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-	📒 Marks standard/official AWS pages and docs
-	🔹 Important or often overlooked tip
-	❗ “Serious” gotcha (used where risks or time or resource costs are significant: critical security risks, mistakes with significant financial cost, or poor architectural choices that are fundamentally difficult to correct)
-	🔸 “Regular” gotcha, limitation, or quirk (used where consequences are things not working, breaking, or not scaling gracefully)
-	📜 Undocumented feature (folklore)
-	🐥 Relatively new (and perhaps immature) services or features
-	⏱ Performance discussions
-	⛓ Lock-in: Products or decisions that are likely to tie you to AWS in a new or significant way — that is, later moving to a non-AWS alternative would be costly in terms of engineering effort
-	🚪 Alternative non-AWS options
-	💸 Cost issues, discussion, and gotchas
-	🕍 A mild warning attached to “full solution” or opinionated frameworks that may take significant time to understand and/or might not fit your needs exactly; the opposite of a point solution (the cathedral is a nod to [Raymond’s metaphor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar)\)
-	📗📘📙 Colors indicate basics, tips, and gotchas, respectively.
-	🚧 Areas where correction or improvement are needed (possibly with link to an issue — do help!)

General Information
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