I'm trying to make a simple-ish website where forms can be submitted publicly, and an admin user can view / search / and do basic crud operations on them. I want to allow users to upload files like images and serve them up as well. I plan to use s3 for static content serving and user uploads, and dynamodb for storing forms / users. I have never deployed anything to aws before or made use of s3 / dynamodb. Do I need to learn terraform to make use of s3 and dynamodb with kotless? Are there any examples projects I can use as a reference? (saw nookbot above)

You’ll need to create dynamodb and s3, yes :) You can use as an example shortener. See Kotless repo examples/kotless/shortener

You can create the data stores "by hand" via the AWS console as opposed to terraform though

So if i put this file in, it will recreate the db on deploy? https://github.com/JetBrains/kotless/blob/master/examples/ktor/shortener/src/main/tf/extensions.tf

In general I do not believe so, i think it depends on the tfstate

No, it will create it only once if terraform is configured properly