28 ms·

Amazon Web Services in Plain English

1479 points by ins0 11y ago

jonathanbull 11y ago
"SES: You could use it to send a newsletter if you wrote all the code, but that's not a great idea." As the co-founder of a startup doing exactly that (https://emailoctopus.com https://emailoctopus.com), I respectfully disagree!
acre88 11y ago
Sad that this is necessary, but glad someone did it. There are AWS services listed here which — when explained this way — I realize I might want to take advantage of.
- eb0la 11y ago
  I agree. There are some AWS consultants out there telling you what should order from AMZ. At least the billing is easier.
byron_fast 11y ago
Excellent! You seem to have overlooked "Elastic Block Store" which should be called "Disk".
- ins0 11y ago
  I'm not the author of this article, but i tweeted your suggestion to the guys. Thank you!
halfelf 11y ago
Thanks for sharing. It's feeling like I've just weared some magic glasses for auto translating.
junto 11y ago
What's amazing is the amount of services Amazon offers. Whenever I look at my AWS console I see these reems of badly named services and I think to myself "after I've dealt with the current problem for which I've logged in AWS, I might get to figure out what all that other stuff actually is". However, I never do because there is more stuff to take care of, and since AWS doesn't make this easy to understand, you just don't bother. Now I know that AWS actually has some really useful stuff, and for things I would never have considered using Amazon for, like video processing (Elastic Transcoder), source control (CodeCommit) and OAuth as a service (Cognito). They just seem to be bad at marketing their stuff. Here's an example: https://www.google.de/search?q=source+code+repository+online&rct=j https://www.google.de/search?q=source+code+repository+online... Why isn't CodeCommit here on the first page of the search results?
- PuffinBlue 11y ago
  I understand where you are coming from. I'm just 'starting out' with a lot of this, despite a few years building/hosting websites, and these sort of services are the things I'm starting to look at. I'm completely disinterested in Amazon's offerings chiefly because they're so obtuse. Why should I expend so much cognitive load just figuring out what each service is and what it could do for me? It's undoubtedly possible to do, AWS has a hell of a lot of users, but I simply am not going to perform the mental gymnastics to work out what they could do for me, let alone work out the price (which seems cleverly designed to keep the final figure a total mystery). Maybe I'm too early in my progression to really need this stuff yet ( I probably am TBH) and so I'm not motivated enough to really dig into it, but the point stands - why should I need to be?
  - Pyxl101 11y ago
    Because when you figure out how to use them, you can save a tremendous amount of time and energy, and build sophisticated systems with simple code and little effort. When you have the need in a certain area, a lot of them will feel like "Wow, I didn't know that someone could automate this for me with so little effort compared to doing it myself". Most of it becomes increasingly valuable as you operate larger systems with many moving parts. These AWS services are each solving a separate problem that people encounter, and usually embody a sort of "design pattern" like a distributed queue, or a load balancer, or a cache. Microsoft Azure and to a lesser extent Google Cloud Platform have similar lists of services (many services, each doing a different thing): https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/ It's really just like figuring out any other software ecosystem, though. If you stacked up a list of open source libraries or commercial libraries in a certain area, I'm sure it will feel the same. For example, so you want to get one application to speak to another over RPC. Well, you could use Apache Thrift, or Google Protocol Buffers, or Cap'n Proto, or Swagger.io, or SOAP or ASN.1 or I'm sure countless other things, and that's simply to perform the same task. What if you wanted a message queue? RabbitMQ, ZMQ, IBM MQ, ... I don't know if anyone has tried to put all of these on the same page and product matrix, or even keep track of them. There's just a lot of stuff out there to learn and take advantage of. Being an effective software engineer in business is just as much about reusing existing stuff as it is about building new stuff from first principles. I'd say it's actually more about reusing stuff, since all other things equal it saves a lot of time. Don't build yourself or manage yourself what you can use for free or buy unless it's your core competency.
sbt 11y ago
So many ways to make your software depend on Amazon.
- JUsr 11y ago
  Seems to work for Reddit, Zynga, Dropbox and Netflix.
  - steckerbrett 11y ago
    Probably avoid using Reddit as a performance metric, they like their 500 errors.
    - nly 11y ago
      Some of that could be Cloudflare
  - hueving 11y ago
    Netflix had to go through a massive engineering effort to make their system reliable enough to work on AWS. If they knew what it would take in human and capital investment, they may have chosen to build their own datacenter.
    - eva1984 11y ago
      Really? I thought they shutdown their last home-made datacenter just recently. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/netflix-shuts-down-its-last-data-center-but-still-runs-a-big-it-operation/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/netfli...
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
    - onion2k 11y ago
      Netflix did have their own data centres. They moved to Amazon to get away from having them. http://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2015/08/netflix-shuts-down-its-last-data-center-but-still-runs-a-big-it-operation/ http://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2015/08/netf...
timclark 11y ago
"It's like: Stacking cash on the sidewalk and lighting it on fire" Is an accurate description of a large number of products that I have been forced to use after various CTOs have played golf with a vendors sales team.
- BetaCygni 11y ago
  Except that lighting cash on fire would be more fun and take less time ;)
  - tonyedgecombe 11y ago
    and it gives off heat so has some use.
    - liotier 11y ago
      I know farms of unused servers that provide plenty of heat !
      - mdellabitta 11y ago
        Is that another plain-English name for EC2, as well?
- inopinatus 11y ago
  It is not an accurate description, however, of the economics or value proposition of Direct Connect. When we're moving TB to an off-cloud location it's almost a no-brainer. Similar when latency sensitive. The highest barrier, quelle surprise, is dealing with interconnect telcos.
  - nissimk 11y ago
    Yeah, and at certain data centers it is as simple as ordering a cross connect. There are many AWS services and each have many use cases where the customer is getting an excellent value. Unfortunately, just like deciphering all of the names is very difficult as OP demonstrated so well, understanding the use cases where you can get a good value as a customer is also esoteric and poorly documented. While AWS has pretty good docs in general for each service. Most of the naive implementations presented in tutorials and docs would not be a valuable reason for a customer to use the service. I wonder if documenting this type of stuff better would help them grow the business or if they just don't care and they want to just rip off as many faces as possible. I guess in traditional enterprise software, this is always the role of the consultants / partners rather than the role of the vendor. The vendor sales guy always just wants you to take the license that puts the most money in his pocket and it is up to those partners and consultants to explain to you how to optimize your usage and licensing.
mattress 11y ago
Why didn't I read this earlier?! I was at an AWS hackathon all day and it was my first time ever using any of their offerings . This would have been super useful.
michaelborromeo 11y ago
Thank you for this. I can't wrap my head around why Amazon would make names for some very useful services so inscrutable. It's like the developers were put in charge of naming everything.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  s/developers/sales/. I think this comes from considering all those services as separate products. After all, today every product needs a distinguishable name, a logo, etc. /s
- raverbashing 11y ago
  To be fair AWS is much, much better than your average 'corporate crap'
- nazka 11y ago
  It's like they started to create different products with their own identity and stopped here. Each product has the same doc, same yellow/white/black design, same marketing, but with a special name. So we have nothing to anchor our mind but that. They should continue to do what they were doing and do a whole sub-website for each one of their product with their own marketing identity. It will make more sense for newcomers to wrap their mind and will ease how they should think about them. They should do the same websites than Vault, Consul, Docker with Route 53, S3, Glacier...
tragomaskhalos 11y ago
Some of these names make you wonder if Amazon are more in love with their own cuteness than in actually getting people to use their stuff - "Elastic Beanstalk" FFS? Either way, Bezos should hire the author of this piece and make him product-naming czar.
- stephenr 11y ago
  He really shouldn't. A number of the AWS names are much clearer than the ones he suggests.
czzarr 11y ago
This was orders of magnitude more helpful than the thousands of words that describe AWS on the AWS website. Thank you.
- nazka 11y ago
  I found this video quite helpful. I hope it will help you. https://youtu.be/DERzYnthq1s?t=21m13s https://youtu.be/DERzYnthq1s?t=21m13s
jlebar 11y ago
I have to say that I think "glacier" is an inspired name. It takes a negative -- slow data retrieval -- and turns it into a positive -- indestructible, huge, unstoppable.
- jonkiddy 11y ago
  I completely agree. It is a great name for the service. "There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors." ~ Jeff Atwood
  - spdionis 11y ago
    I count 4 hard things there.
  - MichaelGG 11y ago
    Jeff Atwood did not come up with that quote.
fenomas 11y ago
Awesome. I wish there was a column to tell you Google's version of the same service, where applicable.
- jpatokal 11y ago
  https://cloud.google.com/free-trial/docs/map-aws-google-cloud-platform?hl=en https://cloud.google.com/free-trial/docs/map-aws-google-clou... You're welcome!
  - jimbokun 11y ago
    The Google names seem to be much closer to the "should have been called" names from the article.
    - johansch 11y ago
      I have started researching both AWS and Google Cloud services over the past couple of months. My clear favorite is Google. Things are generally simpler (in a good, well-designed way). I get the feeling smart hackers are designing things. With AWS, the general feeling is that is designed by bureaucrats, the type of people who like big, slow and boring companies.
tragomaskhalos 11y ago
OhFuckOhFuckOhFuck should have been called: Amazon GitScanner Use this to: search your online source code repos for injudiciously committed access keys It's like: Slamming the door in bitcoin miners' faces I'm surprised they don't offer this actually
- Asbostos 11y ago
  They do, but it runs automatically so no need to name the service.
colordrops 11y ago
What should Lambda be called?
- jschulenklopper 11y ago
  Ha, I also browsed through the list, curious to find the name for AWS Lambda. Perhaps it's omitted because it is tougher to find a good name? Amazon NoServer Computing? Amazon NoEC2?
  - icpmacdo 11y ago
    Amazon NoEC2 is a hilarious name for lambda
- codeN 11y ago
  Amazon Computational Processes.
- inopinatus 11y ago
  I think it is a pretty strong reference that many programmers understand, and speaks volumes about the execution-model-as-value-proposition: "Just give us a piece of code, we'll do the rest". I'd say it's up there with Glacier and CloudFormation as an evocative product name. There is a category violation in the name since, arguably, AWS Lambda functions are not true anonymous functions, having ARNs to identify them. If only I could save environment state along with the code function (e.g. for injection of runtime secrets); it'd be AWS Closure.
Gys 11y ago
Yes ! I need Plain-English-As-A-Service or maybe just Amazon-As-A-Service
mokkol 11y ago
Such an awesome list. Really helpful! Thanks a ton!!
deleted 11y ago
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- ximeng 11y ago
  How would you describe in a few words (in keeping with the theme of the piece)? Where's the main danger as you see it
stephenr 11y ago
Let me preface this by saying I use AWS only when clients insist on it. I think there are much better options that don't lock their customers in anywhere near to the same level. I think AWS has plenty of badly named services, but some of these suggestions are much worse worse (and have a huge American influence - that fascination with using brand/implementation names for a generic/standard item) than the current actual AWS name: * Amazon Unlimited FTP Server - why? ftp is a transfer protocol. S3 is about storage. It should be called Amazon Storage Server. Which it basically is (Simple Storage Service - S3) * Amazon Memcached - I don't used the service so I don't know if it's only binary compatible with memcached but if its a generic cache that has multiple interfaces (the page references redis too) then more generic term like cache (and elastic implies it can grow/expand) seems more logical. * Amazon Beginning Cut Pro - wtf. Transcoding is literally the process of converting a file from one type of encoding to another. That seems to be what this does. Final Cut Pro is not a mere format converter, it's a non-linear editor. * Device Farm - I'll only concede that maybe this should reference mobile devices, but the name seems pretty clear and concise. * CodeCommit - how is "code commit" less clear than "github". By this logic, Apple's email client should be called "Apple Outlook" because Outlook was a well known email client on the market. * EC2 Container Service - the reference to EC2 means its slightly non-obvious, but Amazon Container Service would be much better than something referencing Docker. Docker !== Containers. * WorkDocs, WorkMail - seriously, you're just replacing "Work" with "Company" here. * Storage Gateway - what are you trying to be obtuse? From your very description, this sounds like exactly what the name describes - a local gateway to a storage service. * Elastic Map Reduce - the compute/processing part of Hadoop is Map/Reduce. How is "Hadooper" more clear than the current one? * Machine Learning - you're just being facetious now, right? * OpsWorks - again, why does their name have to reflect a single specific implementation of a fairly well understood term(s) - Operations, DevOps, etc?? edit: typos
- pvg 11y ago
  Yep, a lot of it is "plain English" for the values of "plain English" that include "entirely inaccurate" and "explained in terms of other, just as obtusely named services you may or may not be familiar with". The idea, though, is great - provide some overview of Amazon's zillions of services that doesn't read like it's been generated by a markovbot. Perhaps the authors will improve the implementation.
deleted 11y ago
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dankohn1 11y ago
Has AWS deprecated any of the services they've launched? If not, isn't that almost unprecedented in the worlds of either enterprise software and SaaS?
- cddotdotslash 11y ago
  They used to have SimpleDB which had been mostly deprecated in favor of DynamoDB.
kevindeasis 11y ago
It took me forever to understand what each services aim to do. Like I could have literally been a better programmer by spending all the time learning algorithms instead of figuring out what each of the aws services do. I wish I've had access to this post before. I like the services they offer, I just really hate the names they gave it. Funny enough, Jeff Bezos said in an interview that names of a product is important #irony
- mattmanser 11y ago
  You've got a nasty shock coming then, you'll spend far more time scouring badly written documentation about something that is supposedly simple but just doesn't work and once you've got working you'll never, ever use again until you've forgotten everything and then you need to set it up again and you'll have to go through the whole soul destroying process again but the documentation you find is now out of date, why-god-why, than you ever will implementing algorithms. In fact, if you spend more than a couple of weeks implementing algorithms in your entire career you're probably doing it wrong or part of the 0.1% of programmers working on low level libraries.
  - jimbokun 11y ago
    Now re-read your first paragraph in light of the second one. Sometimes, it really is easier to just implement something your self than go through the "soul destroying process" of figuring out how to correctly set up and configure a library, framework, or piece of open source infrastructure. Not an algorithm, but it can be a lot easier to write your own SQL, for example, than setting up and configuring Spring and Hibernate. (Talk about soul destroying. Yes, I am a Java developer, why do you ask?)
    - Anderkent 11y ago
      > Sometimes, it really is easier to just implement something your self than go through the "soul destroying process" of figuring out how to correctly set up and configure a library, framework, or piece of open source infrastructure But then the next person to look at your code has completely 0 support, rather than the very little support they'd have from the crappy documentation and stack overflow if you used an open source library.
mcherm 11y ago
This guide is surprisingly helpful. Oh, but Glacier (not a bad name, actually) should be "Amazon Storage for Backups".
PuerkitoBio 11y ago
Would be nice if the services' header linked to the official AWS product page.
wil421 11y ago
Great post some of this stuff has been is a mystery to me. Probably one of the reason I use Digital Ocean. For my personal needs, a simple VM will do and they even let me attach my Keys before instance creation.
snorkel 11y ago
Whoa errors! * S3 is not FTP. It's more like static web hosting and storage. * VPC is not a "colocated rack" as it doesn't offer physical placement of hardware. Amazon VLAN would be a better name. It's just private network address space.
- deleted 11y ago
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- code_sterling 11y ago
  Whoa pedantry. It's fine the way it is.
  - Goladus 11y ago
    No, calling it Amazon FTP would be both misleading and incorrect, and is a very bad idea.
    - schrodinger 11y ago
      I disagree. It gets the point across to me, and is presented in the right manner for me to not take it literally.
      - Goladus 11y ago
        Not to me. The absurd lack of plausibility and simply erroneous analogy makes the whole rhetorical technique distracting and misleading rather than funny and insightful.
        code_sterling 11y ago
        You must be fun at parties.
- decwakeboarder 11y ago
  S3 (or any object store) "is like FTP" has been the best explanation I've used. Way too many people I've talked to think that it's a POSIX-compliant filesystem and "like FTP" is familiar enough to them to know that treating it like a standard filesystem is a terrible idea.
michaelbuckbee 11y ago
Hey HN, I wrote this, thanks for all the feedback. In particular if I've mischaracterized the functionality of a service or you see something that's really off please email me at mike@expeditedssl.com or just tell me here and I'll fix it.
- wspeirs 11y ago
  This is great... well done. Any chance you could side-by-side it with Azure & Google Cloud's offerings? That would be MASSIVELY useful!
  - seiji 11y ago
    Holy Rosetta Stone Grail of Infrastructure as a Service: combine this document, include other provider offerings in the grid matching features, then also include the compatibility list from libcloud (https://libcloud.readthedocs.org/en/latest/supported_providers.html https://libcloud.readthedocs.org/en/latest/supported_provide...) so we can understand how everything can easily be used together. Sounds like a good fit as an open source documentation project for a dedicated group of platform researchers to knock out collaboratively in a month.
    - wspeirs 11y ago
      To really "go for the gold" you can add in other abstraction libraries for talking to clouds like http://www.dasein.org/ http://www.dasein.org/ and https://jclouds.apache.org/ https://jclouds.apache.org/
- djm_ 11y ago
  Hi Michael! Great guide. SNS is not just for mobile app developers and should probably belong in the "Web Developer Services" section. It is a general messaging service and can deliver messages to SQS, AWS Lambda, email and arbitrary HTTP(S) endpoints. For example, we have some S3 buckets set up to send an SNS message to an SNS topic on new object creation, the topic then in turn notifies our subscribed HTTPS endpoints by sending the SNS message which we can then parse. You can also connect S3 directly to AWS Lambda so that a new event in the bucket sends an SNS message to a lambda function - which is very handy for doing things such as "server-less" thumbnailing, transcoding, etc etc.
unoti 11y ago
When you're building a new app based around a handful of these services, how do you have any idea what it will cost to host your business on a startup? In the past I've avoided using these, and just used VPS servers doing my own thing, because it's really hard for me to, for example, guess how many database queries I'll do or messages I'll send between app components. I feel much safer saying that I can limit myself to N servers with so much memory. How do you make that jump to thinking the other way?
- clebio 11y ago
  Well, there's a cost calculator that you can use to get an idea (though it requires understanding their services somewhat to put it together correctly): http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html You can also set up billing alerts, though as has been discussed, they aren't strict caps, so you can still exceed your cap.
- Cthulhu_ 11y ago
  I'd say run on Heroku, but IIRC they gave up on their free plan. You could run on Google App Engine though, IIRC they still offer a free service up until a certain number of requests or CPU usage or something in that direction. You could use those to determine how much your application actually uses the service. IIRC, Amazon also offers services for a fixed monthly price, you could look into that too.
  - pravka 11y ago
    Heroku's free tier is alive and well: https://www.heroku.com/pricing https://www.heroku.com/pricing
- tobz 11y ago
  Spitball some calculations? You can start with just a few EC2 instances, so conceivably, you could everything on those you'd do with a VPS. Maybe you decide that managing a database is taking too much of your time, so now you're looking at RDS. It's more expensive, but, it manages just about everything for you. Maybe you make the decision to switch to RDS Now you turn down that EC2 instance running your database. Maybe now you're thinking that RabbitMQ is too much of a pain to manage, so you do the same thing with SQS. Analyze the time/cost savings of switching, and see if it makes sense. I think for new applications, estimating is a lot harder, right? You have no traffic until someone is interested in your product, but you can sort of spitball. There's a bunch of free load testing services out there to let you roughly simulate N concurrent users, and open-source projects to simulate those users yourself. Ultimately, and maybe someone has an idea how to do this: I don't think you can ever plan beforehand. You could be optimistic, and assume your app is going to explode, and that you'll need 8 web servers and redundant load balancers and DB with a read replica... but that's just what it seems like, optimistic. I think the closest you can get is spitballing -- assuming maybe you'll get 100 concurrent users or something -- and making sure you can handle that. Separately, there's the whole issue of trying to make smart decisions ahead of time with your infrastructure, but similarly, this can be really hard to do.
adultSwim 11y ago
Thank you
taivare 11y ago
Frustrating for the beginning developer , I could not even clearly see if they had an in-house service ,for image hosting , or is images3 their brand or 3rd party ? . . . !!
angry_octet 11y ago
I can't agree. This is like all those people who wasted money buying shop.com, and tv.com, when all the recognition is in ebay.com and youtube.com. If you listen to people talk about cloud services they say 'competitor-X's S3 clone', AWS owns the terminology. Also, S3 is NOT some ftp service, it is a new concept. And why should they call Cloudfront instead Amazon CDN? Anyone using it knows what a CDN is and what Cloudfront is? Its like insisting Toyota call the Camry the Toyota Mid Size Car.
- beams_of_light 11y ago
  What differentiates S3 from FTP, WebDAV, or other file transfer technologies?
  - matwood 11y ago
    Wow really? https://aws.amazon.com/s3/details/ https://aws.amazon.com/s3/details/ Replication, versioning, security, life-cycle management, events to name a few.
- gizzlon 11y ago
  Think you took this waaay took seriously ;)
- zephod 11y ago
  I believe the author was making the point that the names are overly descriptive ("Elastic Compute Cloud" -- not at all innaccurate, but not easy to grok; the less descriptive "Amazon Virtual Servers" is easier for a newbie to recognise and intuitively understand). Like most entries on the list, Amazon S3 _is_ a new concept but try explaining it to somebody without mentioning FTP -- you'll see what I mean. What was that quote about the only hard problems in Computer Science?
- shiftpgdn 11y ago
  I don't know who you hang around by Amazon does NOT own the terminology. There have been common names for all this stuff for the last 10-30 years. Amazon invented their own terms out of hubris.
nu2ycombinator 11y ago
Lambdas are missing
edpichler 11y ago
Why do people like to describe services in a complex way? Maybe to seems a more complex product than it really is, or too look like "specialists" speaking about stuff. This is very common for small companies without marketing experience, but this happening in companies like Amazon and Microsoft (Azure), I can't understand.
- jmcomets 11y ago
  A lot of companies have code names for their products, the obvious reason being easy/fast day-to-day communication. IMO this loses its effectiveness when you have a large panel of products, and each one is provided by at least one other company. TL;DR version: I use "Amazon's <service name>" instead of a code name.
  - senderista 11y ago
    AWS's internal code names are never used for the public services.
rburhum 11y ago
The Direct Connect description is gold: "It's like Stacking cash on the sidewalk and lighting it on fire" Pretty spot on...
- chii 11y ago
  I laught real hard at that! it's amazingly accurate :)
ausjke 11y ago
Lovely and really helpful. I used some AWS but never fully understand the rest services, Amazon really should have some 101 page for this on its own. Those names are painfully opaque to say the least.
- lamby 11y ago
  I have always had the slight suspicion that the names for their developer tools are "deliberately" bad. I mean, far easier to replace and supercede "Amazon SZJ" than something generic like "Amazon Messenger". (As an indirect comparison, finding out which generation of "Kindle" I have is quite a challenge)
explosivo2k2 11y ago
This is great. One note: "injest" should be ingest.
- michaelbuckbee 11y ago
  I'd like to claim that this was me trying to hide one more joke in post about how the whole thing was just 'in jest' but I actually just messed that up. Will fix.
leoalves 11y ago
DynamoDB is nothing like mongodb. Its more like a key/value database.
- SubuSS 11y ago
  Actually we have a lot in common :). In addition to KV pairs storage, DynamoDB supports querying, documents, indexing and streaming from a feature stand point and infinite provisioning/scaling from a infrastructure stand point. Give it a shot and ping me about any questions!
matthewrhoden1 11y ago
This is awesome! I spent probably an hour or two yesterday wading through all of it to figure out exactly what each piece does. This make it really clear.
ycosynot 11y ago
It makes me think that eventually technology will be so vast, there will be a need for a 'Google Translate' of such terms.
kelukelugames 11y ago
This should bed added as a new language in Google translate.
arbuge 11y ago
SES is great for newsletters. We use it for that all the time. Not sure why this article concludes it's only a good idea for transactional email.
- justinator 11y ago
  I agree - I built support for Amazon SES into Dada Mail[0], and allows my users to take a quantum leap from running Dada Mail and using their (not so good) shared host mail servers, to sending via SES. Deliverability and speed goes through the roof and the service is incredibly cheap AND you're in complete control over your own data, as your hosting the app yourself. [0] http://dadamailproject.com/ http://dadamailproject.com/
  - justinator 11y ago
    Also, original author - are you using confirmation in your email subscriptions? I signed up for your mailing list, and didn't get a confirmation email - it just says I'm subscribed. That's usually not a good idea, as I can put just anyone's email address in there. FYI.
hopeless 11y ago
Love this! Loved it so much I made it into a tampermonkey script: https://gist.github.com/ideasasylum/2d7518611ffaacbc5061 https://gist.github.com/ideasasylum/2d7518611ffaacbc5061 So now my Amazon dashboard looks like: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/iko1p8jdwdvjpaq/2015-09-11%20at%2016.08.png https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/iko1p8jdwdvjpaq/2015-09-...
- nathancahill 11y ago
  Nice! You could save a good amount of space in the names by dropping the "Amazon". It's cleaner.
  - hopeless 11y ago
    I could but that would involve some editing — I stripped the content directly from the parent post!
    - nathancahill 11y ago
      Just a simple find and replace: https://gist.github.com/nathancahill/a5761667e9d1d4377463 https://gist.github.com/nathancahill/a5761667e9d1d4377463
- samstave 11y ago
  Dont forget to also edit your dashboard to exclude anything not in your stack.
hmate9 11y ago
Love it. Keep it simple. It is too often the case that writes assume their readers have the same knowledge as they do. Always assume your reader knows nothing.
justicezyx 11y ago
Come on, I expect HN posts to be much more thoughtful...
justicezyx 11y ago
Full of crap...
ukd1 11y ago
The SWF description is pure garbage; it's got nothing to do with EC2, or IronWorker at all. Oddly, I think it's named sanely - it lets you setup and manage a workflow using small bits of code.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
tdebroc 11y ago
Nice one: Machine Learning Should have been called Skynet
tdebroc 11y ago
Nice one: Machine Learning Should have been called Skynet
lazyant 11y ago
One of the good things about this is that when somebody comes again comparing AWS to any regular ISP's VM we can point at this to show that EC2 alone may not look favourably in a comparison, it's the other services in the vast AWS ecosystem that brings the value.
brixon 11y ago
Best One: It's like: Stacking cash on the sidewalk and lighting it on fire
dummy7953 11y ago
Classic! This shows what I've been saying for a long time now - programmers suck at marketing and can't name products competently. I fully expect to be cruising Github one day and see a project named "TwizzleFartKWZ."
linkydinkandyou 11y ago
"CodeCommit" (which I use and like) is _nothing_ like GitHub. There's no community. In fact, that's why I like it. Things basically default to locked down and private, non discoverable. It's just an easy way to host Git repos on reliable servers with a nice permissions mechanism for authorizing users.
benjarrell 11y ago
Is there something like this for Heroku?
cdnsteve 11y ago
The fact that their service portfolio has grown so large that you need a guide to navigate through it is very telling. Has AWS grown too vast?
- BadassFractal 11y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
pierceg 11y ago
This is gold. I wrote a quick and dirty chrome extension that adds these names to the dashboard: https://github.com/pierceg/Amazonese https://github.com/pierceg/Amazonese
rmason 11y ago
Now if someone would write a book translating Linux commands into plain English it would be a best seller. Or in other words explain it like you would to an experienced Windows user.
wonjun 11y ago
Thank you, such a great post, I'd like to try getting a certificate from expeditedssl on AWS next.
tomcampbell 11y ago
Amazon literally should pay you for this. I will be signing up for some additional services now that I know what they are. Thank you. Also, love the light application of humor.
pg_is_a_butt 11y ago
i have never used S3 to do anything with FTP. FTP is terribly insecure... S3 is not. you're an idiot. stopped reading.
disbelief 11y ago
Possible alternative "should have been called" for Glacier: "Amazon Write Only S3"

1479 points by ins0 11y ago

"SES: You could use it to send a newsletter if you wrote all the code, but that's not a great idea." As the co-founder of a startup doing exactly that (https://emailoctopus.com https://emailoctopus.com), I respectfully disagree!

acre88 11y ago

Sad that this is necessary, but glad someone did it. There are AWS services listed here which — when explained this way — I realize I might want to take advantage of.

eb0la 11y ago
I agree. There are some AWS consultants out there telling you what should order from AMZ. At least the billing is easier.

byron_fast 11y ago

Excellent! You seem to have overlooked "Elastic Block Store" which should be called "Disk".

ins0 11y ago
I'm not the author of this article, but i tweeted your suggestion to the guys. Thank you!

halfelf 11y ago

Thanks for sharing. It's feeling like I've just weared some magic glasses for auto translating.

junto 11y ago

What's amazing is the amount of services Amazon offers. Whenever I look at my AWS console I see these reems of badly named services and I think to myself "after I've dealt with the current problem for which I've logged in AWS, I might get to figure out what all that other stuff actually is". However, I never do because there is more stuff to take care of, and since AWS doesn't make this easy to understand, you just don't bother. Now I know that AWS actually has some really useful stuff, and for things I would never have considered using Amazon for, like video processing (Elastic Transcoder), source control (CodeCommit) and OAuth as a service (Cognito). They just seem to be bad at marketing their stuff. Here's an example: https://www.google.de/search?q=source+code+repository+online&rct=j https://www.google.de/search?q=source+code+repository+online... Why isn't CodeCommit here on the first page of the search results?

PuffinBlue 11y ago
I understand where you are coming from. I'm just 'starting out' with a lot of this, despite a few years building/hosting websites, and these sort of services are the things I'm starting to look at. I'm completely disinterested in Amazon's offerings chiefly because they're so obtuse. Why should I expend so much cognitive load just figuring out what each service is and what it could do for me? It's undoubtedly possible to do, AWS has a hell of a lot of users, but I simply am not going to perform the mental gymnastics to work out what they could do for me, let alone work out the price (which seems cleverly designed to keep the final figure a total mystery). Maybe I'm too early in my progression to really need this stuff yet ( I probably am TBH) and so I'm not motivated enough to really dig into it, but the point stands - why should I need to be?
- Pyxl101 11y ago
  Because when you figure out how to use them, you can save a tremendous amount of time and energy, and build sophisticated systems with simple code and little effort. When you have the need in a certain area, a lot of them will feel like "Wow, I didn't know that someone could automate this for me with so little effort compared to doing it myself". Most of it becomes increasingly valuable as you operate larger systems with many moving parts. These AWS services are each solving a separate problem that people encounter, and usually embody a sort of "design pattern" like a distributed queue, or a load balancer, or a cache. Microsoft Azure and to a lesser extent Google Cloud Platform have similar lists of services (many services, each doing a different thing): https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/ It's really just like figuring out any other software ecosystem, though. If you stacked up a list of open source libraries or commercial libraries in a certain area, I'm sure it will feel the same. For example, so you want to get one application to speak to another over RPC. Well, you could use Apache Thrift, or Google Protocol Buffers, or Cap'n Proto, or Swagger.io, or SOAP or ASN.1 or I'm sure countless other things, and that's simply to perform the same task. What if you wanted a message queue? RabbitMQ, ZMQ, IBM MQ, ... I don't know if anyone has tried to put all of these on the same page and product matrix, or even keep track of them. There's just a lot of stuff out there to learn and take advantage of. Being an effective software engineer in business is just as much about reusing existing stuff as it is about building new stuff from first principles. I'd say it's actually more about reusing stuff, since all other things equal it saves a lot of time. Don't build yourself or manage yourself what you can use for free or buy unless it's your core competency.

sbt 11y ago

So many ways to make your software depend on Amazon.

JUsr 11y ago
Seems to work for Reddit, Zynga, Dropbox and Netflix.
- steckerbrett 11y ago
  Probably avoid using Reddit as a performance metric, they like their 500 errors.
  - nly 11y ago
    Some of that could be Cloudflare
- hueving 11y ago
  Netflix had to go through a massive engineering effort to make their system reliable enough to work on AWS. If they knew what it would take in human and capital investment, they may have chosen to build their own datacenter.
  - eva1984 11y ago
    Really? I thought they shutdown their last home-made datacenter just recently. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/netflix-shuts-down-its-last-data-center-but-still-runs-a-big-it-operation/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/netfli...
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - onion2k 11y ago
    Netflix did have their own data centres. They moved to Amazon to get away from having them. http://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2015/08/netflix-shuts-down-its-last-data-center-but-still-runs-a-big-it-operation/ http://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2015/08/netf...

timclark 11y ago

"It's like: Stacking cash on the sidewalk and lighting it on fire" Is an accurate description of a large number of products that I have been forced to use after various CTOs have played golf with a vendors sales team.

BetaCygni 11y ago
Except that lighting cash on fire would be more fun and take less time ;)
- tonyedgecombe 11y ago
  and it gives off heat so has some use.
  - liotier 11y ago
    I know farms of unused servers that provide plenty of heat !
    - mdellabitta 11y ago
      Is that another plain-English name for EC2, as well?
inopinatus 11y ago
It is not an accurate description, however, of the economics or value proposition of Direct Connect. When we're moving TB to an off-cloud location it's almost a no-brainer. Similar when latency sensitive. The highest barrier, quelle surprise, is dealing with interconnect telcos.
- nissimk 11y ago
  Yeah, and at certain data centers it is as simple as ordering a cross connect. There are many AWS services and each have many use cases where the customer is getting an excellent value. Unfortunately, just like deciphering all of the names is very difficult as OP demonstrated so well, understanding the use cases where you can get a good value as a customer is also esoteric and poorly documented. While AWS has pretty good docs in general for each service. Most of the naive implementations presented in tutorials and docs would not be a valuable reason for a customer to use the service. I wonder if documenting this type of stuff better would help them grow the business or if they just don't care and they want to just rip off as many faces as possible. I guess in traditional enterprise software, this is always the role of the consultants / partners rather than the role of the vendor. The vendor sales guy always just wants you to take the license that puts the most money in his pocket and it is up to those partners and consultants to explain to you how to optimize your usage and licensing.

mattress 11y ago

Why didn't I read this earlier?! I was at an AWS hackathon all day and it was my first time ever using any of their offerings . This would have been super useful.

michaelborromeo 11y ago

Thank you for this. I can't wrap my head around why Amazon would make names for some very useful services so inscrutable. It's like the developers were put in charge of naming everything.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
s/developers/sales/. I think this comes from considering all those services as separate products. After all, today every product needs a distinguishable name, a logo, etc. /s
raverbashing 11y ago
To be fair AWS is much, much better than your average 'corporate crap'
nazka 11y ago
It's like they started to create different products with their own identity and stopped here. Each product has the same doc, same yellow/white/black design, same marketing, but with a special name. So we have nothing to anchor our mind but that. They should continue to do what they were doing and do a whole sub-website for each one of their product with their own marketing identity. It will make more sense for newcomers to wrap their mind and will ease how they should think about them. They should do the same websites than Vault, Consul, Docker with Route 53, S3, Glacier...

tragomaskhalos 11y ago

Some of these names make you wonder if Amazon are more in love with their own cuteness than in actually getting people to use their stuff - "Elastic Beanstalk" FFS? Either way, Bezos should hire the author of this piece and make him product-naming czar.

stephenr 11y ago
He really shouldn't. A number of the AWS names are much clearer than the ones he suggests.

czzarr 11y ago

This was orders of magnitude more helpful than the thousands of words that describe AWS on the AWS website. Thank you.

nazka 11y ago
I found this video quite helpful. I hope it will help you. https://youtu.be/DERzYnthq1s?t=21m13s https://youtu.be/DERzYnthq1s?t=21m13s

jlebar 11y ago

I have to say that I think "glacier" is an inspired name. It takes a negative -- slow data retrieval -- and turns it into a positive -- indestructible, huge, unstoppable.

jonkiddy 11y ago
I completely agree. It is a great name for the service. "There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors." ~ Jeff Atwood
- spdionis 11y ago
  I count 4 hard things there.
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  Jeff Atwood did not come up with that quote.

fenomas 11y ago

Awesome. I wish there was a column to tell you Google's version of the same service, where applicable.

jpatokal 11y ago
https://cloud.google.com/free-trial/docs/map-aws-google-cloud-platform?hl=en https://cloud.google.com/free-trial/docs/map-aws-google-clou... You're welcome!
- jimbokun 11y ago
  The Google names seem to be much closer to the "should have been called" names from the article.
  - johansch 11y ago
    I have started researching both AWS and Google Cloud services over the past couple of months. My clear favorite is Google. Things are generally simpler (in a good, well-designed way). I get the feeling smart hackers are designing things. With AWS, the general feeling is that is designed by bureaucrats, the type of people who like big, slow and boring companies.

tragomaskhalos 11y ago

OhFuckOhFuckOhFuck should have been called: Amazon GitScanner Use this to: search your online source code repos for injudiciously committed access keys It's like: Slamming the door in bitcoin miners' faces I'm surprised they don't offer this actually

Asbostos 11y ago
They do, but it runs automatically so no need to name the service.

colordrops 11y ago

What should Lambda be called?

jschulenklopper 11y ago
Ha, I also browsed through the list, curious to find the name for AWS Lambda. Perhaps it's omitted because it is tougher to find a good name? Amazon NoServer Computing? Amazon NoEC2?
- icpmacdo 11y ago
  Amazon NoEC2 is a hilarious name for lambda
codeN 11y ago
Amazon Computational Processes.
inopinatus 11y ago
I think it is a pretty strong reference that many programmers understand, and speaks volumes about the execution-model-as-value-proposition: "Just give us a piece of code, we'll do the rest". I'd say it's up there with Glacier and CloudFormation as an evocative product name. There is a category violation in the name since, arguably, AWS Lambda functions are not true anonymous functions, having ARNs to identify them. If only I could save environment state along with the code function (e.g. for injection of runtime secrets); it'd be AWS Closure.

Gys 11y ago

Yes ! I need Plain-English-As-A-Service or maybe just Amazon-As-A-Service

mokkol 11y ago

Such an awesome list. Really helpful! Thanks a ton!!

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

ximeng 11y ago
How would you describe in a few words (in keeping with the theme of the piece)? Where's the main danger as you see it

stephenr 11y ago

Let me preface this by saying I use AWS only when clients insist on it. I think there are much better options that don't lock their customers in anywhere near to the same level. I think AWS has plenty of badly named services, but some of these suggestions are much worse worse (and have a huge American influence - that fascination with using brand/implementation names for a generic/standard item) than the current actual AWS name: * Amazon Unlimited FTP Server - why? ftp is a transfer protocol. S3 is about storage. It should be called Amazon Storage Server. Which it basically is (Simple Storage Service - S3) * Amazon Memcached - I don't used the service so I don't know if it's only binary compatible with memcached but if its a generic cache that has multiple interfaces (the page references redis too) then more generic term like cache (and elastic implies it can grow/expand) seems more logical. * Amazon Beginning Cut Pro - wtf. Transcoding is literally the process of converting a file from one type of encoding to another. That seems to be what this does. Final Cut Pro is not a mere format converter, it's a non-linear editor. * Device Farm - I'll only concede that maybe this should reference mobile devices, but the name seems pretty clear and concise. * CodeCommit - how is "code commit" less clear than "github". By this logic, Apple's email client should be called "Apple Outlook" because Outlook was a well known email client on the market. * EC2 Container Service - the reference to EC2 means its slightly non-obvious, but Amazon Container Service would be much better than something referencing Docker. Docker !== Containers. * WorkDocs, WorkMail - seriously, you're just replacing "Work" with "Company" here. * Storage Gateway - what are you trying to be obtuse? From your very description, this sounds like exactly what the name describes - a local gateway to a storage service. * Elastic Map Reduce - the compute/processing part of Hadoop is Map/Reduce. How is "Hadooper" more clear than the current one? * Machine Learning - you're just being facetious now, right? * OpsWorks - again, why does their name have to reflect a single specific implementation of a fairly well understood term(s) - Operations, DevOps, etc?? edit: typos

pvg 11y ago
Yep, a lot of it is "plain English" for the values of "plain English" that include "entirely inaccurate" and "explained in terms of other, just as obtusely named services you may or may not be familiar with". The idea, though, is great - provide some overview of Amazon's zillions of services that doesn't read like it's been generated by a markovbot. Perhaps the authors will improve the implementation.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

dankohn1 11y ago

Has AWS deprecated any of the services they've launched? If not, isn't that almost unprecedented in the worlds of either enterprise software and SaaS?

cddotdotslash 11y ago
They used to have SimpleDB which had been mostly deprecated in favor of DynamoDB.

kevindeasis 11y ago

It took me forever to understand what each services aim to do. Like I could have literally been a better programmer by spending all the time learning algorithms instead of figuring out what each of the aws services do. I wish I've had access to this post before. I like the services they offer, I just really hate the names they gave it. Funny enough, Jeff Bezos said in an interview that names of a product is important #irony

mattmanser 11y ago
You've got a nasty shock coming then, you'll spend far more time scouring badly written documentation about something that is supposedly simple but just doesn't work and once you've got working you'll never, ever use again until you've forgotten everything and then you need to set it up again and you'll have to go through the whole soul destroying process again but the documentation you find is now out of date, why-god-why, than you ever will implementing algorithms. In fact, if you spend more than a couple of weeks implementing algorithms in your entire career you're probably doing it wrong or part of the 0.1% of programmers working on low level libraries.
- jimbokun 11y ago
  Now re-read your first paragraph in light of the second one. Sometimes, it really is easier to just implement something your self than go through the "soul destroying process" of figuring out how to correctly set up and configure a library, framework, or piece of open source infrastructure. Not an algorithm, but it can be a lot easier to write your own SQL, for example, than setting up and configuring Spring and Hibernate. (Talk about soul destroying. Yes, I am a Java developer, why do you ask?)
  - Anderkent 11y ago
    > Sometimes, it really is easier to just implement something your self than go through the "soul destroying process" of figuring out how to correctly set up and configure a library, framework, or piece of open source infrastructure But then the next person to look at your code has completely 0 support, rather than the very little support they'd have from the crappy documentation and stack overflow if you used an open source library.

mcherm 11y ago

This guide is surprisingly helpful. Oh, but Glacier (not a bad name, actually) should be "Amazon Storage for Backups".

PuerkitoBio 11y ago

Would be nice if the services' header linked to the official AWS product page.

wil421 11y ago

Great post some of this stuff has been is a mystery to me. Probably one of the reason I use Digital Ocean. For my personal needs, a simple VM will do and they even let me attach my Keys before instance creation.

snorkel 11y ago

Whoa errors! * S3 is not FTP. It's more like static web hosting and storage. * VPC is not a "colocated rack" as it doesn't offer physical placement of hardware. Amazon VLAN would be a better name. It's just private network address space.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
code_sterling 11y ago
Whoa pedantry. It's fine the way it is.
- Goladus 11y ago
  No, calling it Amazon FTP would be both misleading and incorrect, and is a very bad idea.
  - schrodinger 11y ago
    I disagree. It gets the point across to me, and is presented in the right manner for me to not take it literally.
    - Goladus 11y ago
      Not to me. The absurd lack of plausibility and simply erroneous analogy makes the whole rhetorical technique distracting and misleading rather than funny and insightful.
      - code_sterling 11y ago
        You must be fun at parties.
decwakeboarder 11y ago
S3 (or any object store) "is like FTP" has been the best explanation I've used. Way too many people I've talked to think that it's a POSIX-compliant filesystem and "like FTP" is familiar enough to them to know that treating it like a standard filesystem is a terrible idea.

michaelbuckbee 11y ago

Hey HN, I wrote this, thanks for all the feedback. In particular if I've mischaracterized the functionality of a service or you see something that's really off please email me at mike@expeditedssl.com or just tell me here and I'll fix it.

wspeirs 11y ago
This is great... well done. Any chance you could side-by-side it with Azure & Google Cloud's offerings? That would be MASSIVELY useful!
- seiji 11y ago
  Holy Rosetta Stone Grail of Infrastructure as a Service: combine this document, include other provider offerings in the grid matching features, then also include the compatibility list from libcloud (https://libcloud.readthedocs.org/en/latest/supported_providers.html https://libcloud.readthedocs.org/en/latest/supported_provide...) so we can understand how everything can easily be used together. Sounds like a good fit as an open source documentation project for a dedicated group of platform researchers to knock out collaboratively in a month.
  - wspeirs 11y ago
    To really "go for the gold" you can add in other abstraction libraries for talking to clouds like http://www.dasein.org/ http://www.dasein.org/ and https://jclouds.apache.org/ https://jclouds.apache.org/
djm_ 11y ago
Hi Michael! Great guide. SNS is not just for mobile app developers and should probably belong in the "Web Developer Services" section. It is a general messaging service and can deliver messages to SQS, AWS Lambda, email and arbitrary HTTP(S) endpoints. For example, we have some S3 buckets set up to send an SNS message to an SNS topic on new object creation, the topic then in turn notifies our subscribed HTTPS endpoints by sending the SNS message which we can then parse. You can also connect S3 directly to AWS Lambda so that a new event in the bucket sends an SNS message to a lambda function - which is very handy for doing things such as "server-less" thumbnailing, transcoding, etc etc.

unoti 11y ago

When you're building a new app based around a handful of these services, how do you have any idea what it will cost to host your business on a startup? In the past I've avoided using these, and just used VPS servers doing my own thing, because it's really hard for me to, for example, guess how many database queries I'll do or messages I'll send between app components. I feel much safer saying that I can limit myself to N servers with so much memory. How do you make that jump to thinking the other way?

clebio 11y ago
Well, there's a cost calculator that you can use to get an idea (though it requires understanding their services somewhat to put it together correctly): http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html You can also set up billing alerts, though as has been discussed, they aren't strict caps, so you can still exceed your cap.
Cthulhu_ 11y ago
I'd say run on Heroku, but IIRC they gave up on their free plan. You could run on Google App Engine though, IIRC they still offer a free service up until a certain number of requests or CPU usage or something in that direction. You could use those to determine how much your application actually uses the service. IIRC, Amazon also offers services for a fixed monthly price, you could look into that too.
- pravka 11y ago
  Heroku's free tier is alive and well: https://www.heroku.com/pricing https://www.heroku.com/pricing
tobz 11y ago
Spitball some calculations? You can start with just a few EC2 instances, so conceivably, you could everything on those you'd do with a VPS. Maybe you decide that managing a database is taking too much of your time, so now you're looking at RDS. It's more expensive, but, it manages just about everything for you. Maybe you make the decision to switch to RDS Now you turn down that EC2 instance running your database. Maybe now you're thinking that RabbitMQ is too much of a pain to manage, so you do the same thing with SQS. Analyze the time/cost savings of switching, and see if it makes sense. I think for new applications, estimating is a lot harder, right? You have no traffic until someone is interested in your product, but you can sort of spitball. There's a bunch of free load testing services out there to let you roughly simulate N concurrent users, and open-source projects to simulate those users yourself. Ultimately, and maybe someone has an idea how to do this: I don't think you can ever plan beforehand. You could be optimistic, and assume your app is going to explode, and that you'll need 8 web servers and redundant load balancers and DB with a read replica... but that's just what it seems like, optimistic. I think the closest you can get is spitballing -- assuming maybe you'll get 100 concurrent users or something -- and making sure you can handle that. Separately, there's the whole issue of trying to make smart decisions ahead of time with your infrastructure, but similarly, this can be really hard to do.

adultSwim 11y ago

Thank you

taivare 11y ago

Frustrating for the beginning developer , I could not even clearly see if they had an in-house service ,for image hosting , or is images3 their brand or 3rd party ? . . . !!

angry_octet 11y ago

I can't agree. This is like all those people who wasted money buying shop.com, and tv.com, when all the recognition is in ebay.com and youtube.com. If you listen to people talk about cloud services they say 'competitor-X's S3 clone', AWS owns the terminology. Also, S3 is NOT some ftp service, it is a new concept. And why should they call Cloudfront instead Amazon CDN? Anyone using it knows what a CDN is and what Cloudfront is? Its like insisting Toyota call the Camry the Toyota Mid Size Car.

beams_of_light 11y ago
What differentiates S3 from FTP, WebDAV, or other file transfer technologies?
- matwood 11y ago
  Wow really? https://aws.amazon.com/s3/details/ https://aws.amazon.com/s3/details/ Replication, versioning, security, life-cycle management, events to name a few.
gizzlon 11y ago
Think you took this waaay took seriously ;)
zephod 11y ago
I believe the author was making the point that the names are overly descriptive ("Elastic Compute Cloud" -- not at all innaccurate, but not easy to grok; the less descriptive "Amazon Virtual Servers" is easier for a newbie to recognise and intuitively understand). Like most entries on the list, Amazon S3 _is_ a new concept but try explaining it to somebody without mentioning FTP -- you'll see what I mean. What was that quote about the only hard problems in Computer Science?
shiftpgdn 11y ago
I don't know who you hang around by Amazon does NOT own the terminology. There have been common names for all this stuff for the last 10-30 years. Amazon invented their own terms out of hubris.

nu2ycombinator 11y ago

Lambdas are missing

edpichler 11y ago

Why do people like to describe services in a complex way? Maybe to seems a more complex product than it really is, or too look like "specialists" speaking about stuff. This is very common for small companies without marketing experience, but this happening in companies like Amazon and Microsoft (Azure), I can't understand.

jmcomets 11y ago
A lot of companies have code names for their products, the obvious reason being easy/fast day-to-day communication. IMO this loses its effectiveness when you have a large panel of products, and each one is provided by at least one other company. TL;DR version: I use "Amazon's <service name>" instead of a code name.
- senderista 11y ago
  AWS's internal code names are never used for the public services.

rburhum 11y ago

The Direct Connect description is gold: "It's like Stacking cash on the sidewalk and lighting it on fire" Pretty spot on...

chii 11y ago
I laught real hard at that! it's amazingly accurate :)

ausjke 11y ago

Lovely and really helpful. I used some AWS but never fully understand the rest services, Amazon really should have some 101 page for this on its own. Those names are painfully opaque to say the least.

lamby 11y ago
I have always had the slight suspicion that the names for their developer tools are "deliberately" bad. I mean, far easier to replace and supercede "Amazon SZJ" than something generic like "Amazon Messenger". (As an indirect comparison, finding out which generation of "Kindle" I have is quite a challenge)

explosivo2k2 11y ago

This is great. One note: "injest" should be ingest.

michaelbuckbee 11y ago
I'd like to claim that this was me trying to hide one more joke in post about how the whole thing was just 'in jest' but I actually just messed that up. Will fix.

leoalves 11y ago

DynamoDB is nothing like mongodb. Its more like a key/value database.

SubuSS 11y ago
Actually we have a lot in common :). In addition to KV pairs storage, DynamoDB supports querying, documents, indexing and streaming from a feature stand point and infinite provisioning/scaling from a infrastructure stand point. Give it a shot and ping me about any questions!

matthewrhoden1 11y ago

This is awesome! I spent probably an hour or two yesterday wading through all of it to figure out exactly what each piece does. This make it really clear.

ycosynot 11y ago

It makes me think that eventually technology will be so vast, there will be a need for a 'Google Translate' of such terms.

kelukelugames 11y ago

This should bed added as a new language in Google translate.

arbuge 11y ago

SES is great for newsletters. We use it for that all the time. Not sure why this article concludes it's only a good idea for transactional email.

justinator 11y ago
I agree - I built support for Amazon SES into Dada Mail[0], and allows my users to take a quantum leap from running Dada Mail and using their (not so good) shared host mail servers, to sending via SES. Deliverability and speed goes through the roof and the service is incredibly cheap AND you're in complete control over your own data, as your hosting the app yourself. [0] http://dadamailproject.com/ http://dadamailproject.com/
- justinator 11y ago
  Also, original author - are you using confirmation in your email subscriptions? I signed up for your mailing list, and didn't get a confirmation email - it just says I'm subscribed. That's usually not a good idea, as I can put just anyone's email address in there. FYI.

hopeless 11y ago

Love this! Loved it so much I made it into a tampermonkey script: https://gist.github.com/ideasasylum/2d7518611ffaacbc5061 https://gist.github.com/ideasasylum/2d7518611ffaacbc5061 So now my Amazon dashboard looks like: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/iko1p8jdwdvjpaq/2015-09-11%20at%2016.08.png https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/iko1p8jdwdvjpaq/2015-09-...

nathancahill 11y ago
Nice! You could save a good amount of space in the names by dropping the "Amazon". It's cleaner.
- hopeless 11y ago
  I could but that would involve some editing — I stripped the content directly from the parent post!
  - nathancahill 11y ago
    Just a simple find and replace: https://gist.github.com/nathancahill/a5761667e9d1d4377463 https://gist.github.com/nathancahill/a5761667e9d1d4377463
samstave 11y ago
Dont forget to also edit your dashboard to exclude anything not in your stack.

hmate9 11y ago

Love it. Keep it simple. It is too often the case that writes assume their readers have the same knowledge as they do. Always assume your reader knows nothing.

justicezyx 11y ago

Come on, I expect HN posts to be much more thoughtful...

justicezyx 11y ago

Full of crap...

ukd1 11y ago

The SWF description is pure garbage; it's got nothing to do with EC2, or IronWorker at all. Oddly, I think it's named sanely - it lets you setup and manage a workflow using small bits of code.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

tdebroc 11y ago

Nice one: Machine Learning Should have been called Skynet

tdebroc 11y ago

Nice one: Machine Learning Should have been called Skynet

lazyant 11y ago

One of the good things about this is that when somebody comes again comparing AWS to any regular ISP's VM we can point at this to show that EC2 alone may not look favourably in a comparison, it's the other services in the vast AWS ecosystem that brings the value.

brixon 11y ago

Best One: It's like: Stacking cash on the sidewalk and lighting it on fire

dummy7953 11y ago

Classic! This shows what I've been saying for a long time now - programmers suck at marketing and can't name products competently. I fully expect to be cruising Github one day and see a project named "TwizzleFartKWZ."

linkydinkandyou 11y ago

"CodeCommit" (which I use and like) is _nothing_ like GitHub. There's no community. In fact, that's why I like it. Things basically default to locked down and private, non discoverable. It's just an easy way to host Git repos on reliable servers with a nice permissions mechanism for authorizing users.

benjarrell 11y ago

Is there something like this for Heroku?

cdnsteve 11y ago

The fact that their service portfolio has grown so large that you need a guide to navigate through it is very telling. Has AWS grown too vast?

BadassFractal 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

pierceg 11y ago

This is gold. I wrote a quick and dirty chrome extension that adds these names to the dashboard: https://github.com/pierceg/Amazonese https://github.com/pierceg/Amazonese

rmason 11y ago

Now if someone would write a book translating Linux commands into plain English it would be a best seller. Or in other words explain it like you would to an experienced Windows user.

wonjun 11y ago

Thank you, such a great post, I'd like to try getting a certificate from expeditedssl on AWS next.

tomcampbell 11y ago

Amazon literally should pay you for this. I will be signing up for some additional services now that I know what they are. Thank you. Also, love the light application of humor.

pg_is_a_butt 11y ago

i have never used S3 to do anything with FTP. FTP is terribly insecure... S3 is not. you're an idiot. stopped reading.

disbelief 11y ago

Possible alternative "should have been called" for Glacier: "Amazon Write Only S3"