Are you using AWS? If so, what problems/challenges have you run into that could be solved with a tool or toolkit?

Challenges that I've come across in my career that I think could be easily automated or productized:

1. How to set up an appropriate infrastructure, separation of concerns ( databases vs. web apps, etc).
2. How to create independent and restricted data access (ACL's and the like)
3. Auto-scaling - how to automate this in a simple fashion and save people money
4. Identification of unused resources -- this one hits home. We've often created resources and forgotten to clean them up...only to find out at the end of the month they were on. Prompts us to remove but we could of save $1000s.

AWS is powerful and cheap. For me as a one man show I really don’t want to “waste” my time with the cloud stuff. This is why I am using Heroku.
It’s simple and you can start deploying your projects very fast. Downside: its expansive.

One disadvantage of AWS is the learning curve. While it’s demonstratively the most powerful platform, I believe there is a market for a product with a lower learning curve and predictable pricing . I started Amezmo (https://www.amezmo.com) 12 months ago to make PHP application stacks easy to host and scale.

Obviously AWS provides the raw infrastructure, but having a provision automation tool would be useful( and there are lots of tools of this kind in the PHP market.

There are best practices for AWS, but they don't really guide you into them.

A frequent challenge people have is lift-and-shipping existing application to the cloud where resources, such as IP address, change. They'll do silly things like store uploaded data on an EC2 instead of S3, etc.

Their infrastructure-as-code offering. CloudFormation, is anemic, often not supporting all the products (so people use Terraform instead).

Also, AWS' Kubernetes story is poor, and if you're basically better off rolling your own cluster using kops if you're not using Fargate.

I suppose that's actually a viable business idea: making setting up IaC on AWS easy. Though AWS will probably get better at that in time.