At re:Invent Amazon announced re:Post, a Q&A service that replaced the AWS Forums and is designed to offer crowd-sourced and expert-reviewed answers to technical questions about AWS.
The new service targets developers who have technical questions about AWS services, debating design or deployment issues or preparing for AWS certifications. Users can post questions, answers, perform full text search, while community experts can moderate and validate the content. Users can collect reputation points in different ways, for example providing accepted answers, and reviewing feedback from other users or obtaining AWS certifications.
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-repost-a-reimagined-qa-experience-for-the-aws-community/
Steve Roberts, developer advocate at AWS, explains how the service was born:
Over the last four years, AWS re:Post has been used internally by AWS employees helping customers with their cloud journeys. Today, that same trusted technical guidance becomes available to the entire AWS community.
All active users from the previous AWS Forums have been migrated to the new service, as well as the most-viewed content. Anton Babenko, AWS community hero and CEO at Betajob, would like to have APIs:
How do you ask questions in AWS re:Post if there is no API or Terraform support but you prefer to have "everything as code"?
Threads from customers who have premium support and do not receive a valid response from the community are escalated to AWS support engineers, triggering a support case and making the conversation private. Robin Ford, senior delivery manager at Accenture UK, writes:
re:Post (Stack Overflow for AWS) will improve the answers side of AWS. Hopefully it will mean information and solutions are shared more widely and also troubleshooting steps easily available rather than logging a support ticket every time.
Niklas Bergius, system architect at Panagora, questions the similarities with Stack Overflow:
AWS re:Post is obviously a clone of the Stack Overflow Q&A system. Has there been any collaboration, or is it just a blatant reimplementation?
The new service is part of the AWS Free Tier and requires an AWS account. Maurice Borgmeier, cloud consultant & trainer at tecRacer, suggests:
Allow users to sign up independent from AWS accounts. Many contributors have multiple AWS accounts and would like to have an identity they can take with them if they choose to switch employers at some point.
A thread to allow alternative logins is currently active on re:Post. There is no requirement to sign in to browse questions and answers.
