>If you want EC2 to be a virtual hosting service, for example. You are expected to use RDS if you want to store data, not put it on an EC2 instance.
Heaps of people run their own datastores on AWS, this doesn't feel like a great example.
The point was that it's lower friction to use the AWS services, and RDS is a great example of this - you can certainly run your own database in EC2, but if you use RDS it's far less work as many things are provided automatically or very easily. Of course, RDS doesn't suit all use cases, but that's true of many AWS services.
The first point revolves around AWS not providing tools they provide building blocks. To me this is true basically of all AWS, not just Lambda. If you come into AWS without understanding that they are building blocks meant to be used together, you will experience pain and suffering. If you want EC2 to be a virtual hosting service, for example. You are expected to use RDS if you want to store data, not put it on an EC2 instance. You are better off using their blocks together rather than trying to roll your own.
The second thing about the documentation seemed like a non-starter... I took him up on the challenge of finding out how to pass arguments to a python lambda, so I typed in "aws lambda python", which google suggested adding "example" to. The first hit showed "If you are passing in this JSON, your function will look like this".
Obviously, this guy had a hard time trying to deploy a Python lambda, and I haven't tried to do the same myself, but it felt a bit off base to me.