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Amazon Web Services in Plain English
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- adarshr 8y agoProbably this is better - https://github.com/open-guides/og-aws https://github.com/open-guides/og-aws
- crunchlibrarian 8y agoThis page is hilarious, and reminds me of the early days of both open source and cloud services when everyone thought you needed some complicated sounding new phrase & acronym to be taken seriously. Just because that's the way IBM, Oracle, etc did it so we had to emulate that.
- pdxandi 8y agoI got a kick out of this site and agree with all of these suggestions. As a video guy of sorts, this one was my favorite: Elastic Transcoder - Should have been called Amazon Beginning Cut Pro - Use this to deal with video weirdness (change formats, compress, etc.).
- scarface74 8y agoI don’t agree with EC2. When people think about EC2 they only think about VMs. Amazon considers the EC2 service a service that encompasses, VMs, load balancers, and a lot of other stuff. “Amazon SQL” makes it sound like Amazon’s bespoke sql database. RDS is hosted Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, MarisDB, and Postgres. They all behave so much differently it really doesn’t make any sense to combine them into one service.
- artur_makly 8y agonow if someone can translate Google’s services....
- sladey 8y agoGCP products, for the most part, have a name that describes it very well. https://cloud.google.com/products/ https://cloud.google.com/products/
- shubhamjain 8y agoAzure service names by comparison: Virtual Machines, Storage, Functions, Pipelines, Archive Storage, Active Directory, Repos [1]. Personally, I am not irked by less-descriptive names as much as with the hoard of acronyms—S3, EC2, SQS, SES, SNS. [1]: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/services/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/services/
- bdcravens 8y agoThey did Azure: https://www.expeditedssl.com/azure-in-plain-english https://www.expeditedssl.com/azure-in-plain-english
- scarface74 8y agoWhat is? - Data Bricks? - HD Insights - Data Factory - Cycle Cloud - Signal R (does that have anything to do with the R programming language)? I know what Signal R is but if I weren’t a C# developer I wouldn’t. I’ll give you that most of the names make sense, but it will still take me the same year to be confident that I was architecting the correct solution on Azure that it took me on AWS.
- rospaya 8y agoOn the other hand, using "Azure DevOps" for CI/CD is just plain misleading.
- deboflo 8y agoI know this is a joke, but I’m glad this person wasn’t in charge of naming these services. Amazon’s concise and consistent names often translate directly to API calls, making it possible to guess CLI methods.
- dvtrn 8y agoSolid point, but I'd like to offer that aws-cli has built in autocomplete, should help out with some of the 'guessing' https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-command-completion.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-command...
- deboflo 8y agogood point. That’s great if the SDK for the language you are using has a utility for autocomplete and the terminal or IDE you are using has that utility installed, which may not always be the case.
- simonebrunozzi 8y ago(disclaimer: I worked at AWS from 2008 to 2014 as Technology Evangelist) I always disliked most of the acronyms. The worst for me was Elastic Beanstalk, a name allegedly picked by Bezos himself. I thought that choice was really poor, considering that most of the world doesn't know what Beanstalk refers to. This is what happens when you grow up in an English culture and think that the world functions like yours. I had the luck of being from a different culture (Italy), and therefore an easier way to discern certain things. It doesn't mean that this "type" of fairy-tale is unknown, in fact its origins might trace back to 5,000 years. In addition, "Jack and the Beanstalk" is an Aarne-Thompson tale-type 328, The Treasures of the Giant, which includes the Italian "Thirteenth" and the French "How the Dragon was Tricked" tales." [0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_and_the_Beanstalk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_and_the_Beanstalk
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- CitrusFruits 8y agoI don't think this is so much a facet of growing up in an English culture, because their names make no sense to me either; I was born and raised in America, and work in web technologies. This isn't an American/English speaking cultural thing, it's something else.
- unfunco 8y agoJack and the Beanstalk is known to almost everyone in the United Kingdom, a version with moral overtones is usually taught to school children, and it's a popular choice for pantomimes (in fact, it's on right now near me: https://www.atgtickets.com/shows/jack-and-the-beanstalk/liverpool-empire/ https://www.atgtickets.com/shows/jack-and-the-beanstalk/live...)
- OJFord 8y agoI'm British, and well aware of the tale; the name EBS still makes no sense to me.
- rehevkor5 8y agoAmazon high throughput? How about Amazon distributed queues? Amazon EC2 Queue? How about Amazon State Machines? Or Amazon BPM?
- gfodor 8y agoYeah the SWF one is off. I feel like SWF doesn't get enough attention. It's pretty brilliant.
- revel 8y agoI suspect that the person who made this site worked at Amazon. The way they describe SWF makes me think that the author used it when it was in it's prerelease, "Decider" form. The "Flow" version that went onto become the one that was publicly released has a slightly different set of terminology and doesn't expose the use of queues in the same way the Decider version did. I love publicly released version of SWF and think it's a severely underrated product.
- fredliu 8y agoFWIW, "Amazon EC2 Queue" actually covers a lot of real world use cases for SWF where a "queue" is needed to manage states and distribute works among workers. The list is a bit out dated, and as for Amazon State Machines, it's a name more suited for AWS Step Functions, which is the successor of SWF (and defined as an actual state machine). Step Functions do cover lots of SWF use cases (rightfully so as a successor), but also more cases like service orchestration, etc.
- finchisko 8y agoNot saying I'm huge fan of AWS service names, but don't mind them either. Didn't feel it as blocking issue and got familiar with them quite fast.
- brazzledazzle 8y agoYeah the names are annoying for all of a few minutes. I suppose if you weren’t working directly with them a lot (like a management role perhaps) it could be really annoying but it’s not hard to make a cheat sheet. I’d rather google “ebs <issue>” because it’s pretty unique. Google eventually picks up on your preferences for non-unique names so not the worst thing though.
- EADGBE 8y ago> I’d rather google “ebs <issue>” because it’s pretty unique. Google eventually picks up on your preferences for non-unique names so not the worst thing though. I appreciate it for this. As a developer, I've tried to research Django-related items before (The Python Django). But as a guitarist, I've also done a lot of research about Django (Reinhardt). Getting the right Django is sometimes confusing when Google knows you have a deep interest in both unrelated items. Codenames are great like this if they're not reused.
- capi_salazar 8y agoSimply brilliant. I've genuinely been struggling to comprehend what most services are.
- ypeter 8y agoI think most of the names are fine, now it’s easy to Google on issues related to a particular service. Try Googling on “amazon queue issue” instead of “aws sqs issue”...
- TsomArp 8y agoAmazonVS should be pretty unique.
- projectramo 8y agoTo quote Aziz Ansari in the human giant: "I don't want you out there on the bully plane calling me up, saying 'hey, I gotta pull up my marshmallow pants and hit the boohoo button, 'cause I don't know where the cranberries are.' You know what I mean?"
- secabeen 8y agoEC2 is actually a really good name, as it has the important part of cloud right in the name: elastic. Generally, if your load is elastic, and you can design your solution to take advantage of the elasticity of EC2, you will do well in the cloud. If you just lift-and-shift your virtual machines into EC2, with no elasticity or scaling, you're going to hurt, in either performance, cost, or both.
- eshyong 8y agoMy favorite is the original page from 2015: https://web.archive.org/web/20150910211935/https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english https://web.archive.org/web/20150910211935/https://www.exped... Don't forget to see the DirectConnect description.
- torstenvl 8y agoI mean... shortened obscure names for things in the tech world isn't exactly unique. Here's one for basic UNIX commands: ls list_files Lists files in a directory cd change_dir Changes the current working directory cat cat_barf Takes stuff in and immediately hacks it up onto stdout Etc.
- jwandborg 8y agocat concatenate Concatenate all files given as arguments as well as stdin. Similar to: Your twitter feed
- liquidise 8y agoIs there truth to that last one? I always assumed cat was short for concatenate and my brief googling appears to confirm that. Would love to read more on this if someone has a reference to cat_barf
- copperx 8y agoCat is for catenate. Later the word became concatenate.
- OJFord 8y agoIt appears not: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=concatenate%2Ccatenate&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=6&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=concatenate%2C... My understanding is that when you catenate A and B you concatenate A with B. That is, the catenation of A and B is AB, but the concatenation of A and B is A (catenated with what - we haven't said) and B (ditto). Of course this is basically trivia and the word that's used is concatenate.
- torstenvl 8y agoNo. I was joking. :-P
- Scoundreller 8y agoIn 2011, a polish bitcoin wallet company, "Bitomat", lost 17000 bitcoins ($231k at the time...) because they were running their operation off Amazon EC2 and wanted to upgrade their servers. EC2 servers are "ephemeral". It's believed the operators glossed over the significance of the word when architecting their system and restarting their servers. https://siliconangle.com/2011/08/01/third-largest-bitcoin-exchange-bitomat-lost-their-wallet-over-17000-bitcoins-missing/ https://siliconangle.com/2011/08/01/third-largest-bitcoin-ex... Sidenote: MtGox acquired them and made the users whole. Everyone wondered how they could do that. Maybe they never really did. https://old.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/jfkfw/mtgox_to_acquire_bitomatpl_compensate_loss_of/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/jfkfw/mtgox_to_acq...
- scarface74 8y agoThe storage for EC2 can either be instance store - storage on the same server as the instance and is ephemeral or EBS backed - networked storage that survives restarts and instance upgrades. This is made super clear when you terminate instances and/or resize them.
- dexterdog 8y agoIt wasn't always that way, but I'm pretty sure the option was there by 2011, as I believe it was released around 2010.
- guitarbill 8y agoI guess it's up for debate. While I agree some are silly (Elastic Beanstalk/Kinesis), renaming the product does not necessarily increase discoverability, which is a bigger issue. As for this list, I find a lot of these too dumbed down or missing some huge use-cases. S3 is simply an object store, which is a fairly common term. So "Unlimited FTP Server" is less obvious to me, and sounds old, outdated, and a security risk (although S3 can be that, too). Lambda is functions-as-a-service, or serverless. "App Scripts" would also tell me nothing, or sound like something for Office. SNS main use-case for us is not to "send mobile notifications, emails and/or SMS messages", but to link two systems together where some loss is acceptable, so "Amazon Messenger" is worse. SQS and SNS fit together well.
- nostrebored 8y agoI think the sqs and sns naming convention is a bit confusing. Realizing that sns should be the typical choice for an event based architecture is weird to people used to working with a message queue
- scarface74 8y agoSNS and SQS works together but serve two different purposes. SNS is for producers. You use SNS to say something happened. You have no guarantee that any consumer actually successfully processed the message and if the consumer is down, that message is lost to them. The only way a consumer can actually directly process a message is by subscribing to via http or lambda. But again, if the consumer errors or is down, you’re out of luck. SQS is a traditional simple queueing mechanism. It has no fanout capability on its own but you do get the traditional queuing functionality. But it doesn’t make sense logically for more than one process (or group of processes doing the same thing) to consume the queue. If you want the traditional fanout, filtering, multiple queues that do different things on the same event/message, you use SNS and SQS together.
- cthalupa 8y ago>If you want the traditional fanout, filtering, multiple queues that do different things on the same event/message, you use SNS and SQS together. For this sort of use case, I've generally opted to go with a Kinesis stream, and I'm having a bit of a hard time understanding why a mix of SNS and SQS would be better here.
- nostrebored 8y agoI work with a service every day named Connect. I can't even find articles which I know exist using Google and nearly exact names. "Amazon connect best practices troubleshooting" gets you to other AWS services like direct connect. This is the only service name that truly bugs me.
- garblegarble 8y agoTry adding quotes, e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q="aws+connect"+best+practises+troubleshooting https://www.google.com/search?q="aws+connect"+best+practises... brings back results only to do with Amazon Connect.
- nostrebored 8y agoRight, but as a user who has no idea what's available I'm sure that the ux is miserable
- fareesh 8y agoThis is badly needed for so many things. Amazon is the worst offender. Even the logos for the services are terrible
- lukev 8y agoSure, a lot of AWS services could have been named better. But a lot of these are terrible, downright misleading names. Some examples: S3 as "Amazon Unlimited FTP Server": S3 has nothing to do with the FTP protocol. VPC as "Amazon Virtual Collocated Rack": VPCs don't have anything to do with either collocation (they can span AZs), much less physical racks. Lambda as "AWS App Scripts": really disagree with this one. Their intent is to be microservices or event handling functions, not scripts. "Scripts" isn't really descriptive but usually implies a manually invoked automation that modifies some kind of stateful resource (such as files). Lambda is basically the exact opposite. There are lots more that are problematic or overly simplified as well. I don't say this to crap on the effort, just... be careful if you're relying on this for your understanding of what AWS does.
- iandanforth 8y agoYou can tell the age/mentality of the person who wrote some of these names as they match very closely with my mental models. An "FTP Server" is inaccurate, but perfectly descriptive for me. Scripts is the same thing, "a small program which gets run repeatedly for a very specific task." So I think this is more of a guide for a 30-40 something dev who hasn't bothered to keep up with the proliferation of services.
- WhyNotHugo 8y agoWhenever I read FTP, I assume very legacy, very insecure protocols. Mostly because FTP has been considered insecure and kinda deprecated since 1999, and we've had better things (eg: SFTP) since. So, for somebody in their fourties it might be a better name, but for somebody younger, it's definitely misleading.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- fredley 8y agoAmazon Drawer of old Android devices is the best alternative name. This is a fantastic resource, I wish I'd had it when I first dived (dove?) into AWS. Maybe these shouldn't actually be names, but it would be nice to have nice descriptions like this in the AWS documentation.
- gist 8y agoCall this 'the language they speak'. Let me explain why I believe (in part) they are doing this (and Jeff Barr can chime in). AWS does this so that people learning from the start in cloud computing 'children' get used to the Amazon term (trademarked) and then it's harder for them to leave. Because all of the other things they would need to do elsewhere have unfamiliar terms. And now the Amazon term is what resonates in their head 'the language they speak'. So the brand name is the moat. Meanwhile if you are Linode or Rackspace and you call it a VPS then it's easy to find an alternate provider of a VPS somewhere else. Business wise it's on purpose and honestly it (in this case wouldn't work for everyone I might add) it's really smart.
- mr_toad 8y agoI remember the days when getting a new VPS instance meant placing an order and waiting for hours if not days for the server to be provisioned manually. So when I hear the term VPS I don’t think cloud, I think ‘inflexibility’ and ‘manual setup’.
- scarface74 8y agoIt only takes a little Googling to find mappings between AWS/Azure/GCP. The brand name isn’t even a puddle. The moat is the APIs.
- michaelbuckbee 8y agoAuthor here - I haven't updated this in a while, but am always grateful for the appreciative comments and emails I get when it gets rediscovered. There's also usually two other comments: 1. Why isn't it funnier / meaner? (an early version had a couple more pointed descriptions). 2. Why aren't these names more accurate? The answer to both is that I was trying to be help people form a rough mental model of what / how and in what context they would use the services - that they could then take as a jumping off point for doing their own research into. Nobody is relying on my jokey 2 sentence description of these services to make deep architectural choices about their apps. What I have heard many many times though is: "Oh! I didn't realize that's what AWS Service X did."
- maximp 8y ago> I was trying to be help people form a rough mental model of what / how and in what context they would use the services - that they could then take as a jumping off point for doing their own research into. This is exactly what I'm trying to do with Hackterms [1] - would love it if you could check it out and maybe contribute AWS definitions. We're up to 1200+ from hundreds of contributors like you. [1] https://www.hackterms.com https://www.hackterms.com
- byproxy 8y agoReminds of this book I found at a thriftshop, "The New Hacker's Dictionary" : https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/the-new-hacker-s-dictionary-0262680696 https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/the-new-hack... (though probably with a lot less snark)
- aasasd 8y agoThe Jargon File was the old ultimate reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jargon_File https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jargon_File A lot of old hacker culture can be learned from it. Might be actually a good thing that it's not updated anymore.
- skosch 8y ago
- throwme_1980 8y agolol
- sergiotapia 8y agoHow the hell can Amazon afford to host all of these services?!
- davidgerard 8y agoWe live on AWS. This is frickin' brilliant, and I just sent it around the technology department. I also love the sponsorship message: > Hey, this is sponsored by SendCheckIt - and by "sponsored" I mean that's what I've been working on instead of updating this list.
- hamilyon2 8y agoI disagree. WAF is very transparently named