24 ms·

AWS services explained in one line each

1668 points by jaytaph 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jchw 6y ago
Useful and interesting but some of them are either blank or, well: > After reading it over and over again, i still have no idea what it does. > Some quantum thing. It’s in preview so I have no idea what it is. > in preview so no idea.
- jaytaph 6y ago
  Yes.. some of them I have absolutely no clue on what it does. They might serve some edgecase specific for that domain. There are a few services in preview which I cannot see for myself what it does. I will try to update and correct services as soon as I have more info (or somebody can provide it to me)
  - mariodiana 6y ago
    No one dast blame this man.
  - skriticos2 6y ago
    Indeed. One of the entries like this is a dedicated robot infrastructure service (like, managing real robot hardware that does something out there - think delivery robots). Certainly out of the usual software domain. They also collaborate with a few different quantum computer companies that do different approaches to quantum computing (gate based and annealing) which is an entirely separate field of science and most likely out of the usual comfort zone of most IT people.
  - marz157 6y ago
    Hey, dev here for Robomaker. Most relevant line from our overview page is probably "AWS RoboMaker is the most complete cloud solution for robotic developers to simulate, test and securely deploy robotic applications at scale." The main feature is the on-demand cloud hosted version of the robotics simulator gazebo ( http://gazebosim.org/ http://gazebosim.org/ ) that allows you to run your robot's code in a 3d physics environment. You can then take that tested/verified code and deploy it over the air via our fleet management features to your actual robot.
    - jaytaph 6y ago
      THanks.. will update this
superasn 6y ago
This can be a good cheat-sheet and no wonder there have been so many attempts at this(1). Maybe we're better off making this as github page where users can send pull requests and add/rewrite to these. (1) https://netrixllc.com/blog/aws-services-in-simple-terms/ https://netrixllc.com/blog/aws-services-in-simple-terms/ (2) https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/
- wegs 6y ago
  I'd prefer to see this integrated into the AWS UX. For an external crowd-sourced version, I'd like to see something like this with a column for maturity, and whether it actually works. The classic AWS services are rock-solid, and perfectly sufficient to build a business on. Many of the newer ones are.... much less so. A green checkmark, yellow question mark, and red land mine icon would go a long way towards letting me know what I should and shouldn't use.
  - imglorp 6y ago
    > integrated into the AWS UX Sure, it should be right in the headline of the service's "about" page. The fact that people need this at all is UX problem. If people are reading your "about" page and nobody understands what the hell your thing does, maybe your marketing, faux-tech, word salad is pointless.
    - Frost1x 6y ago
      >The fact that people need this at all is UX problem. Is it a UX problem or is it intentional deep branding to further promote vendor lock-in? This is one reason I've been opposed to AWS since the early phases--I don't want to learn all of their stupid branded vendor-specific nomenclature.
      - scarface74 6y ago
        If you are any sort of real business, you already “locked in” to more than likely a dozen or more third party services. I worked at a company whose entire workflow was tightly integrated into Workday via APIs, not to mention SalesForce. If you have ever worked in healthcare, the level of “lock-in” that they have to their EHR/EMR and various other third party services. would make you cry.
panpanna 6y ago
Well this was really useful. I didn't knew cloudfront was an Amazon product. I wonder what cloudflare people think of that.
- detaro 6y ago
  > I wonder what cloudflare people think of that. Because of the name? Cloudfront is older then Cloudflare afaik.
  - panpanna 6y ago
    Didn't knew that. Given the discussion few months back, I thought maybe this was one of those lets-copy-our-costumers-business we-already-know-everthing-he-does things.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  CacheFly is another CDN with a somewhat similar name ('CF'). I think they're all different enough that things are clear, though.
unixhero 6y ago
Useful, but it contains factual errors: >S3 File storage. Not directly used for mounting, but you can directly download files from HTTP. You most certainly can mount S3 buckets, and its done frequently in data pipelines throughout the industry[0]. >S3 Glacier Low cost storage system for backups and archives and such Sure but it would be good to include why there is a tradeoff in price, why is it low cost? For Glacier its intention is to provide storage, but rarely fetch data, as it is very slow. [0] https://github.com/s3fs-fuse/s3fs-fuse https://github.com/s3fs-fuse/s3fs-fuse
- eterps 6y ago
  How is that a factual error? It didn't say that mounting was impossible, just that it isn't directly used for mounting. How did you conclude that it's done frequently throughout the industry? What percentage of S3 customers do you think does this? If I would have to guess I'd say less than 1%. But I am happy to learn I am wrong.
  - pfortuny 6y ago
    You are totally right, and your explanation is perfect. No need to bother. You could also mount gmail accounts as a filesystem.
    - unixhero 6y ago
      I beg to differ. I have already argumented against it, and provided evidence for my statement [0]. My argument is logically airtight.
  - slau 6y ago
    Not OP, but my current gig is literally building streaming data pipelines on top of S3 using lambdas that only have a few hundred MBs of RAM to process gigabytes or more of data. S3FS is as close as it comes to mounting in my book.
- matharmin 6y ago
  It's a one-line summary, not an in-depth explanation or comparison. "Not directly used for mounting" is a good summary of the intended use.
celsocrivelaro 6y ago
Thank you so much :-). I have no ideia about some services, even reading the doc.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
speedgoose 6y ago
I see that AWS IoT Greengrass is missing. https://aws.amazon.com/greengrass/ https://aws.amazon.com/greengrass/ I may be wrong but from what I understood, it's more or less a way to manage AWS Lambda functions (cgi-bin scripts), Docker, and a MQTT client connected to AWS on your GNU/Linux devices (raspbian on a raspberry pi for example, or a x86 pc). However you still need Ansible or similar to manage the device so the actual value is kinda low because if you have a setup to manage the device, it's not much more work to manage docker and a mqtt client yourself. About running AWS Lambda functions on a the device, I think it makes sense for AWS to check the box "IoT edge computing with AWS Lambda" but unless you have a huge codebase in AWS lambda, it seems to be a bad idea. In one sentence : "vendor locked half baked IoT platform".
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  Aurora doesn't get a mention either. It's covered under RDS, but still, it seems worth an entry as a service they offer.
- jaytaph 6y ago
  The whole lot of IOT services are pretty confusing. Mostly because I have no experience with IOT/MQTT in general and it took a few days to actually figure out how to create and connect things (emulated). I actually bought some IOT devices (lamps, sensors) to try it out, but this turned out to be vendor-locked without any possibilities for MQTT. I reckon somebody with more experience in the IOT field could provide more insight in these things.
  - dirktheman 6y ago
    Do your sensors/lamps use Zigbee? I use the excellent Zigbee2MQTT library and a DIY Zigbee sniffer. Now I can use most vendor-locked IOT-devices (Hue, Ikea Tradfri, cheapo Chinese stuff) in my Home Assistant without the need of a separate bridge. Check if your devices are supported here: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/information/supported_devices.html https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/information/supported_devices.htm...
    - 6y ago
v8engine 6y ago
Reminded me of these similar threads I read a while earlier: Azure: https://web.archive.org/web/20190321175020/https://www.expeditedssl.com/azure-in-plain-english https://web.archive.org/web/20190321175020/https://www.exped... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13442597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13442597 AWS: https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10202286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10202286
- jaytaph 6y ago
  I figured somebody has done this before. I purposely did not look for it to keep my findings unbiased. It was fun clicking on random services and tweak with it until figuring out what it was for and how to use it (and actually see some results)
- dynamite-ready 6y ago
  Would love to see an update to the Azure list.
- philipodonnell 6y ago
  Any update to the Azure list anyone has seen? 2017 is a long time ago.
  - freeone3000 6y ago
    New Azure services tend to have names like "Cognitive Services Speech" or "Cognitive Services Image Recognition" or "Azure Stateful Functions"... There's not a lot to riff on.
kevsim 6y ago
This is really well done! I might tweak the Lambda one a little to mention what they run in response to or to even drop in the serverless buzzword.
highprofittrade 6y ago
Route 53 is too generalized
k__ 6y ago
"Large & scalable non-relational database (but not really a NoSQL system)" triggered
- zambal 6y ago
  Ha, that caught my eye too. I'd say DynamoDb is kind of the poster child of the whole NoSQL thing.
  - jaytaph 6y ago
    Yes, you are right. I was thinking more about it not being a document-store like Mongo or couchdb. But I agree it's NoSQL.. will update
davedx 6y ago
Consider that your typical enterprise software project will use quite a lot of these, and that you pay for them all separately, and sometimes pay twice for them (e.g. S3 you pay for storage and for outbound bandwidth). It's quite a tour de force how Amazon have taken "separation of concerns", applied it to web services and used it to create complex and difficult to understand or predict pricing to print money. Bravo.
- exhaze 6y ago
  Have you ever used AWS? There's a whole suite of tools they provide around pricing and budgeting. > It's quite a tour de force how Amazon have taken "separation of concerns", applied it to web services and used it to create complex and difficult to understand or predict pricing to print money. Is applying separation of concerns to web services really that bad? Look, if you're a small company with a simple product, you can just put your stuff on a few EC2 boxes and pay the monthly bill for that. At that size, your infra costs are going to be dwarfed by your other costs of doing business anyway. If you're a big business, you can literally pay people to keep track of this stuff. You've got the extra money, because now you don't employ data center architects, server engineers, etc. AWS is able to "print money" because it brings a lot of value to many businesses.
  - rumanator 6y ago
    > Have you ever used AWS? There's a whole suite of tools they provide around pricing and budgeting. They don't work. To elaborate, they fail to provide the user with information with enough clarity to allow him to form accurate mental models of what is being used,what it costs, and what is the implication in cost of applying some change. Heck, at any given moment it's unexplainably hard to tell exactly which AWS services are you actually using, and being billed for. The only reliable info on cost it the invoice you receive at the end of the month. Even then, the AWS guys felt the need to develop a full blown machine learning service to help customers predict what their next invoice will be.
    - exhaze 6y ago
robert_g 6y ago
There's an open guide[1] that's pretty useful. Amazon also publishes (at least some) documentation on Github[2]. [1] https://github.com/open-guides/og-aws https://github.com/open-guides/og-aws [2] https://github.com/awsdocs https://github.com/awsdocs
calmchaos 6y ago
AWS sounds like a good idea until you start calculating the cost of the setup with any kind of clustering and moderate data traffic.
- pg-gadfly 6y ago
  The compute is really a negligible part and one that you can severely effect. Outbound bandwidth is the real killer, going at ~$90/TB
  - PetahNZ 6y ago
    Or RDS, which jumps from db.t3.medium, to db.r5.large.
  - anonymou2 6y ago
    So you give them your data for free then you need to pay the ransom money to get it back?
s_dev 6y ago
Similar to https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ Why does AWS use such convoluted language? Is it because they're dominant and it adds friction to moving to another provider?
- zxienin 6y ago
  Because your enlightened state is in conflict with their commercial interest. Providing complex answers to simple questions, almost always is due to a need to hide sth.
  - pg-gadfly 6y ago
    It reminds me of cult-speak, where everything has to be redefined according to some abstract higher level representation, even when it's simple.
    - ImaCake 6y ago
      This is typical in finance. Many of the financial "instruments" are given funny nouns that hide the true character of what they are (usually shitty loans, or stocks being sold at a mark-up).
- cm2187 6y ago
  Same with Azure. Even when I understand what it does, I am baffled of how they came up with the name.
- ben509 6y ago
  I think it's because naming things is hard, that link proves it by coming up with worse names for almost everything they tried to rename, and often far, far worse. Imagine the confusion if S3 were called "Amazon Unlimited FTP Server." That gets every word wrong, except that "Amazon" is merely redundant. It's not unlimited (having to pay for a thing is a limit), it's not using FTP, and it's a service, not a server. Or if VPC was "Amazon Virtual Colocated Rack". A "colocated rack" means your computer in their datacenter. They actually have this service, it's called Direct Connect, because you can actually Lambda does require you've got some vague notion of what lambda notation is. But "AWS App Scripts" suggests it's for mobile "apps", but it is not specific to those. And it suggests it's only for scripts, but you can run an entire application on Lambda just fine. Or even DynamoDB. They recommend "Amazon NoSQL." They're not offering many NoSQL databases, just their proprietary one: DynamoDB. They have a service that offers many relational databases and that is called Relational Database Service.
mraza007 6y ago
This is useful.
fauria 6y ago
Similar to "Amazon Web Services In Plain English": https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english Seen on HN (2015): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10202286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10202286
unilynx 6y ago
Cool list! But I would just name "Lightsail" "Amazon's digital ocean"
drcongo 6y ago
It's sad that this is so necessary, but I'm still confused by the very first two lines of this list. > EC2 Virtual Private Servers > Lightsail Amazon’s hosting provider (vps, dns, storage) Both of these are VPS? EC2 has no storage? Absolutely not a criticism of your list, more a comment on how baffling AWS is these days. I stopped using AWS once they hit the point where I couldn't reasonably be expected to remember what all the three letter acronyms were. I still occasionally have to use it for S3, Route53 and IAM - but every time I log into the console I find that they've removed them from my "pinned" services in the menu bar and I have to pin them again. Even this tiny detail is enough to make me not want to have to deal with that * 1000 by taking up more of the services.
- OJFord 6y ago
  Well, to EC2 you attach storage from another AWS service. I've not used Lightsail, but from the description I imagine it's a more 'single package, quickstart' service mirroring the experience you might get from a PaaS like DigitalOcean/Scaleway/Vultr/etc. vs. the IaaS style provisioning of compute & storage independently.
- jitix 6y ago
  EC2 requires you to specify the attached storage to it, giving you more options; lightsail doesnt. Lightsail is more like the ye'old VPS services.
- callamdelaney 6y ago
  I think pinned items are on a browser basis - because I logged into another account on the same browser and it had the same pins as my other account, without me setting them.
  - drcongo 6y ago
    I only use Safari for any actual browsing, I've not noticed this happening, just that whatever I pin is gone next time I log in. Maybe it's short lived cookie.
- scarface74 6y ago
nojito 6y ago
How to waste money in just one line each... Simplifying AWS like this only serves to normalize wasteful spending on the "cloud". This works when the economy is great....not so much when businesses are looking to trim costs.
- scarface74 6y ago
  Yes I’m sure you know every single vertical and business model well enough to know whether it’s a “waste of money”.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
syats 6y ago
Is there something similar for Apache projects?
- adwww 6y ago
  Ha good luck explaining in one sentance the difference between Flume, Spark, Storm, NiFi, Camel, Apex, Flink, Beam.....
  - faizshah 6y ago
    I’ll try. Heres what u should know from these: Fast, Reliable, Stream Processing - Flink Data Science on Big Data - Spark Reliable Distributed Log Aggregation - Flume Low Code Data Flows w/ GUI - NiFi Zapier for Enterprise Software - Camel A Single API for Batch and Stream Jobs. Execute on Spark, Flink, managed services etc. - Beam Never heard of anyone use Apex over Flink. Storm community has branched off into Flink, Spark Streaming, Heron and Cloud Dataflow. Explaining Spark vs Flink is quite hard tho.
    - yazaddaruvala 6y ago
      From the little I know, Spark was built as a Batch job solution. Flink was built as a Streaming solution. Since Spark needed to adapt, they leveraged micro-batching to operate as a streaming solution. They are very similar today. Maybe some remnants of the original design make Spark "slightly less appropriate" for pure streaming usecases, or possibly less able to iterate on future features/optimizations, but so-far that line of reasoning has been only speculation.
      - faizshah 6y ago
        So Flink differentiates in stream processing in two major ways: - Flink guarantees exactly once stream processing through a barrier checkpointing system. - Flink has very detailed APIs for handling state and doing stateful stream processing. Additionally, Flink has one of the most active communities in the Apache Software Foundation: https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-software-foundation-announces55 https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-softwar... In situations where you want to create a streaming application with persistent state you might choose Flink over spark streaming.
richrichardsson 6y ago
> VPC Create your own VPCs within AWS Not particularly helpful if you have no idea what a VPC is! Of course it takes 2 seconds to search this for yourself, but still.
- wartijn_ 6y ago
  Isn't VPC a wel known term? I guess the author just included that definition to make the list complete.
  - jaytaph 6y ago
    I've updated it to "virtual private network" instead.
    - kube-system 6y ago
      You're never going to please everyone, but I think that might be confused with a VPN. Amazon simply describes it as a "virtual network"
    - richrichardsson 6y ago
      I think just expanding it would be more helpful. I had seen the term before and knew exactly what a Virtual Private Cloud was once being reminded what VPC actually stood for.
  - richrichardsson 6y ago
    I had to look it up, even though I'd seen the term before I had forgotten its meaning.
jason0597 6y ago
Sometimes I sit back and wonder if Amazon makes these names so complicated on purpose. Hmm, now that I think about it more, maybe they had to come up with these weird names so they could trademark them?
foobarbecue 6y ago
Where's EBS?
- jaytaph 6y ago
  EBS is actually part of the EC2 service. It's not listed explicitly in the console service menu. So I did not add it. (same goes with loadbalancing, security groups etc)
  - foobarbecue 6y ago
    Aha, I see.
lode 6y ago
Some corrections: AWS Outposts: Run Amazon services in your own datacenter (not on your own hardware) Storage Gateway: Virtual appliance to couple on-premises applications to storage in the cloud. (So it's no iSCSI (block) to S3 (object) but Block(iSCSI to EBS), File (SMB/NFS/S3 to S3), or Tape (iSCSI VTL)) Addition: VMware Cloud on AWS: Bare-metal, automatically deployed VMware clusters on AWS hardware.
- jaytaph 6y ago
  thanks. Fixed the first one. About storage gateway: as far as I could see (haven't tested it) you get a iscsi path which you can connect to from your own device. It uses S3 as the backend store for files from and to this device. Will try and take some more time to look into it (never used this myself)
harshaw 6y ago
I'll bite. At the very least I would describe S3 as an object store (object semantics) and EFS as POSIX file semantics with an NFS interface.
pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
All AWS services explained in one line: Overpriced, unnecessary or both.
tr33house 6y ago
a bit tangential: I think a lot of AWS customers would actually benefit by hosting on their own machines in a data-center. The tools (and hardware) out there have become so good that there's minimal benefit to hosting on AWS for more than 4x the price. A lot of DCs also accept shipments so that even makes things easier. The trouble is that we've been conditioned, as an industry, not to think for ourselves or dare question certain accepted norms/practices. AWS/Azure/GCloud is great for some but I suspect it's for a much smaller subset that we want to accept.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  That's what we (mid/small-sized company) with couple dozen machines. It is probably 10% the cost of AWS - but you do need to have at least one person that can handle the servers when/if there are issues. That one person only needs to devote maybe 2-5% of their time to it (once the systems are setup), so it's still a net gain.
  - bcrosby95 6y ago
    Yeah, we use a mix of AWS and self hosted machines. We've had up to 40 servers with this method and devoted similarly trivial amounts of time to it. If you want it to be long term sustainable, you probably want at least 2 people that can handle it, so they can go on vacation. If your goal is to be the next billion dollar company, it probably doesn't matter that much. But if you're self-funding and need a sustainable business model from the beginning, there's a huge growth phase (mid-sized) where the cost savings from doing this sort of thing can be large enough to be worthwhile. I'm not sure why so many developers seem afraid of hardware. Back in the early 2000s it definitely felt more commonplace for developers to be able to deal with it. Maybe it's because we grew up having to deal with our own in the form of desktops. Nowadays it seems like lots of people just use a macbook. And that's their only exposure to hardware
    - scarface74 6y ago
      If you want it to be long term sustainable, you probably want at least 2 people that can handle it, so they can go on vacation. The fully allocated cost of two ops people in my neck of the woods is a little over $300K. That can buy a lot from AWS. I'm not sure why so many developers seem afraid of hardware I want to develop. Yes I’ve been around long before AWS was a thing, I had to manage servers, load balancers, and even an elevated “server” room with a SAN with whopping 3TBs of storage back in the early 2000s. But in my old age, my time is valuable. I’ve done the on call thing before where our database server went down in the middle of the night when the night operations crew was working. I won’t work for a company that is not on a cloud provider and doesn’t have a dedicated ops team. But, if you are a small company. Why are you spending a lot on AWS? Two EC2 instances behind a load balancer and a hosted database shouldn’t cost you over $500 a month and that includes a decent amount of traffic and miscellaneous other charges. Heck if you are that small, just use Lightsail and when you grow, peer your Lightsail VPC that you probably didn’t know existed to a real VPC.
andarleen 6y ago
basically, AWS is an ESB sold for parts. understanding this, is the first step in building a competing service.
erwincaco 6y ago
> Amazon Connect AWS version of ZenDesk Wrong. That should be "Amazon's Cloud-based Contact Center" > Pinpoint Create transactional emails based on templates. Pinpoint can do SMS and voice too.
- jaytaph 6y ago
  Isn't that what ZenDesk is too? Yes, pinpoint can do more.. Will update
  - derision 6y ago
    and if I don't know what ZenDesk is, then you're just exchanging one confusing name for another
  - nostrebored 6y ago
    ZenDesk is a CRM/ticketing system. Amazon Connect integrates with ZenDesk CRM.
minitoar 6y ago
Ah I was hoping this was going to pithy/comedic.
RedShift1 6y ago
This is a 100 x better than their website. I've actively walked away from Amazon products because I could barely make out what it really was and if I could use it for the application at hand. Many thanks!
- rantwasp 6y ago
  nowhere close to 100x. actually it’s worse than the aws names across the board. the names have a logic to them but I agree it’s intimidating to learn hundreds of things at the same time - so you don’t. you learn the bits and pieces you need. for example: EC2 actually comes from Elastic Cloud Compute. You have Compute in the Cloud which also happens to be elastic. S3 is Simple Storage Service. It’s a Service for Storing things. It’s simple because it’s just a key-blob storage. Route53 is obvious if you know what runs on port 53.
  - teej 6y ago
    Cognito? Lightsail? Redshift? CodeStar? Athena? Polly? There are loads of AWS services that don’t follow any logic, they’re just distinct, easy to spell nouns.
    - notatoad 6y ago
      which i really appreciate when it comes to googling them for help with stuff. i can google "aws lightsail" and get results directly relating to what i'm looking for. have you ever tried to sift through the mess of seo marketing crap that comes back when your search term includes "VPS"?
    - dodobirdlord 6y ago
      Cognito is an identity service, “incognito” means unknown, “cognito” means known. Polly is a joke about how parrots talk, the service does text-to-speech. Athena is a goddess of wisdom, the service is for querying databases. The name is frequently some sort of silly inside joke. Except Fargate, that name means nothing...
      - 6y ago
013a 6y ago
> Lightsail: Amazon’s hosting provider (vps, dns, storage) Doesn't feel like accurate description for Lightsail, nor a useful one. Maybe something like "simplified deployment and billing for some AWS resources, including VPS, databases, DNS, and load balancers" (listing "storage" as something Lightsail does is kind of weird; of course, it does instance-attached block storage, you couldn't have a VPS without that. critically, it has no S3-like blob storage product, and I think that's what most people would associate the general word "storage" with, but maybe I'm wrong about that).
- flurdy 6y ago
  Sometimes I feel it is easier described by saying what its main competitor is. Lightsail is basically AWS' version of Heroku and App Engine. (i.e. a PAAS) I wish Google would also do this. Many times on GCP's website or at Google Next you try to decipher what the product is that they are talking about, then you realise "ah, it is their version of S3, CloudFormation etc". If they just had said that at the start... Of course, no company will do this, unfortunately.
  - rubber_duck 6y ago
    I've seen companies post feature comparison charts listing competitors, they are very useful when switching from a different provider or discovering what the product does in terms of established player
  - lost_name 6y ago
    Your statement made me wonder if someone else had done this, and sure enough I found something -- https://www.cloudcomparisontool.com/ https://www.cloudcomparisontool.com/ Look for "Object Storange" for instance and in the row will be links to all the competing services, so you could pretty easily do this to learn about competitors through the one you know... At least for the big players.
    - itsmeamario 6y ago
      Isn't this wrong? At Google's Storage options, it says Google doesn't have Backup or Disaster Recovery options. As long as I know, aren't those types into Cloud Storage - nearline and coldline object storage types?
mabbo 6y ago
> Kinesis Collect massive amount of data so you can do analytics (like ELK?) I would say a better description is something like "pay per use Kafka".
Ozzie_osman 6y ago
Would be really awesome if each row also included the open source equivalents.
rudolph9 6y ago
It seems there is a a lot of back and forth on this thread about AWS good/bad. On the one side, people seem offended people use AWS at all Which common it serves a need and generally does what it’s supposed to. On the other side it’s like Stockholm syndrome, do people seriously believe AWS is there for you and hasn’t trapped you in dependency of their services?
ak39 6y ago
Excellent! We need this for esoterically named Javascript frameworks too.
mekster 6y ago
Is there a list of all the AWS services and what the counterpart it may be for a self hosted open source solution? Seems many of the actual services may have one.
sudhirj 6y ago
Most sound about right except for Global Accelerator, which isn’t a way to run your apps on edges, it’s a way to route all your network traffic through the AWS edges. Make it a bit more reliable and faster, and has really cool load balancing and routing options.
tilolebo 6y ago
Very nice! I was surprised by 2 descriptions: Opsworks: I thought it was using Chef under the hood. Is it really Ansible? CloudWatch: it's actually so much more than logging, as it also provides timeseries, alerting and even scheduling. Not sure how to summarize this, though.
- wraithm112 6y ago
  Everything I've seen about OpsWorks is chef/puppet based. Ansible is not mentioned in the opsworks documentation at all. I think that's just wrong.
traeregan 6y ago
Here's the Google Cloud equivalent: https://github.com/gregsramblings/google-cloud-4-words https://github.com/gregsramblings/google-cloud-4-words
- itsmeamario 6y ago
  I came here with the hopes of finding something similar to GCP. Thank you!
- topkeks 6y ago
  That is an excellent list. There's also a guide that compares Google Cloud with AWS and highlights the similarities and differences between the two. https://cloud.google.com/docs/compare/aws https://cloud.google.com/docs/compare/aws
ibatindev 6y ago
Really loved Amazon Braket's explanation
mcv 6y ago
That's kinda useful I guess? But I still don't know whether I need EC2 or Elastic Beanstalk. And do I need still need Batch if I have one of the other two? Still, it's much clearer than Amazon's own pages about this.
- afterwalk 6y ago
  Agreed, a concise description of "why" and "when" would be more useful.
ct520 6y ago
Love it! Does anyone know if something similar for competitors? More specifically azure?
- hundchenkatze 6y ago
  I had this one bookmarked, I think it's originally from 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20190508145128/https://www.expeditedssl.com/azure-in-plain-english https://web.archive.org/web/20190508145128/https://www.exped...
  - ct520 6y ago
    Awesome!!!!!!! Thank you
hagsh 6y ago
Although AWS Braket is just in preview it's pretty safe to say it is a Quantum Computer as a Service bundled with a framework to write you algorithm in (a la IBM Q and qiskit). The nice thing about it is that you have a choice between three hardware vendor, all featuring different architectures giving the ability to test superconducting, ion trap and annealing systems from the same place. I have no affiliation with this other than being a Physics/CS graduate with only one Quantum Computing course under my belt.
StevePerkins 6y ago
> Lightsail - Amazon’s hosting provider (vps, dns, storage) > Kinesis - Collect massive amount of data so you can do analytics (like ELK?) Based on some of these that I'm already familiar with, I don't think I would rely on these descriptions for the ones I'm not already familiar with.
- archielc 6y ago
  Couldn’t agree more.
kumarvvr 6y ago
Out of curiosity, as a solo developer, what would it take me to do on premisis server at home? I mean in terms of hardware and software stack.
Jach 6y ago
It'd be nice to include "year introduced" data as well. My AWS knowledge peaked sometime in 2012 after DynamoDB came out. I know a bit about newer things (like Lambda) but there's a lot of catching up to do...
vivekf 6y ago
The title should have been a computer science introduction to marketing terms
elchief 6y ago
I made this list for my buddy a while back. It's meant to be more humorous than exactly correct Route 53 - Holy shit! It's NSD WAF - Holy shit! It's modsecurity SES - Holy shit! It's Postfix Inspector - Holy shit! It's OSSEC GuardDuty - Holy shit! It's Snort Data Pipeline - Holy shit! It's Cron and Bash Athena - Holy shit! It's Prestodb Glue - Holy shit! It's Hive Metastore and Spark OpsWorks - Holy shit! It's Chef VPC - Holy shit! It's a VLAN Snowball - Holy shit! It's a truck full of hard drives CloudWatch - Holy shit! It's syslogd Neptune - Holy shit! It's Neo4j ElastiCache - Holy shit! It's Redis DynamoDB - Holy shit! It's MongoDB S3 Glacier - Holy shit! It's DVD backup EFS - Holy shit! It's NFS Elastic Block Store - Holy shit! It's a SAN Elastic Beanstalk - Holy shit! It's Apache Tomcat EMR - Holy shit! It's Apache Hadoop Elastic Cloud Compute - Holy shit! It's a virtual machine Kinesis - Holy shit! It's Apache Kafka QuickSight - Holy shit! It's Tableau
- alexchamberlain 6y ago
  > Neptune - Holy shit! It's Neo4j Neptune - Holy shit! It's Blazegraph https://blazegraph.com/ https://blazegraph.com/
  - dkroy 6y ago
    It's sadly missing the RDF inferencing of Blazegraph though.
- abc_lisper 6y ago
  I am going to screenshot this for future reference
  - julianeon 6y ago
    I copy and pasted it for you, to save you a click. Route 53 - Holy shit! It's NSD WAF - Holy shit! It's modsecurity SES - Holy shit! It's Postfix Inspector - Holy shit! It's OSSEC GuardDuty - Holy shit! It's Snort Data Pipeline - Holy shit! It's Cron and Bash Athena - Holy shit! It's Prestodb Glue - Holy shit! It's Hive Metastore and Spark OpsWorks - Holy shit! It's Chef VPC - Holy shit! It's a VLAN Snowball - Holy shit! It's a truck full of hard drives CloudWatch - Holy shit! It's syslogd Neptune - Holy shit! It's Neo4j ElastiCache - Holy shit! It's Redis DynamoDB - Holy shit! It's MongoDB S3 Glacier - Holy shit! It's DVD backup EFS - Holy shit! It's NFS Elastic Block Store - Holy shit! It's a SAN Elastic Beanstalk - Holy shit! It's Apache Tomcat EMR - Holy shit! It's Apache Hadoop Elastic Cloud Compute - Holy shit! It's a virtual machine Kinesis - Holy shit! It's Apache Kafka QuickSight - Holy shit! It's Tableau
FigmentEngine 6y ago
I built this https://moca.computingarchitectures.com/en/vendors/aws/ https://moca.computingarchitectures.com/en/vendors/aws/ as well as visual representation https://moca.computingarchitectures.com/en/~hello-world/ https://moca.computingarchitectures.com/en/~hello-world/
vladoh 6y ago
You are missing one of the really amazing services: Snowmobile (https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/). It is a real truck, that connects to your data center, copies up to 100 PB of data and drives back to one of the AWS data centers and dumps the data there...
- capableweb 6y ago
  "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of hard-drives driving down the highway" or however the saying goes. Latency is extremely long, but the bandwidth is crazy once it's arrive! Edit: Original quote (seems I accidentally modernized it a bit): > Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway – Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981
- kyawzazaw 6y ago
  And the companion Snowball (https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/)
joshfraser 6y ago
Sometimes it pays to be boring. One of the hardest parts of using AWS is learning all their silly names for everything. I know it's tempting to be cute when naming things, but everyone else wishes you would just be clear and descriptive. I've seen this play out at startups that love to name servers after galaxies or cartoon characters. It's all fine until your new employee onboarding guide comes with a massive memorization test before you can be productive. Yes, db-master and db-slave are way more boring names than Saturn and Uranus, but do everyone a favor and express your creativity somewhere else.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  I think they went through a middle phase of cutesy naming, but this seems to have subsided some (to the good). Simple Queuing Service, Simple Storage Service, Elastic Compute Cloud, SimpleDB are names that very much make sense. Greengrass, Lightsail, not so much. EKS, Outpost, Ground Station, and Lake Formation are more toward the usefully descriptive side again, I think.
- ggregoire 6y ago
  Star Wars still seem to be the greatest source of inspiration for backend engineers when comes the time to find a name for a new microservice.
- latencyloser 6y ago
  I worked at a company that had names for all the conference and meeting rooms based on various science fiction names and other "nerdy" stuff instead of some sort of building-floor-room_number scheme. It was neat at first, but quickly became agonizing trying to remember what _building_ a conference room was in much less where in that building. It added an extra few minutes to every meeting for me where I had to either look it up on the internal wiki or go ask someone at the front desk where I was supposed to go or make sure at least one person nearby attending the meeting already knew where we were going. It took months to get the hang of for even the more routine rooms.
barry27 6y ago
"AWS DeepComposer Computer generated music. It’s as horrible as it sounds." it's so true. go to aws and find this deep mind composer. play twinkle twinkle little star. press 'generate composition'. now play it again. wtaf.
tlobes 6y ago
Tested Sumerian and it's a barebones 3D web tool (modeled after Unity but more akin to ThreeJS editor) that can be controlled via script by other services. One example is being able to do some tasks like in-browser AR.
aptrishu 6y ago
mediaconnect - to transport live video mediapackage - package live/on demand video content mediastore - store video assets for live/on demand video content
rijdz 6y ago
somebody please make something like this for azure please
windex 6y ago
Someone do this for Oracle and SAP's products list too please. It's a mess of marketing speak and no one has a clue. With SAP you dont even get to see the product in most cases. It's just marketing you have to make your buying decision on.
callmekatootie 6y ago
Does anybody know if we have something similar for Azure?
danielovichdk 6y ago
Soon we will all be back to hosting everything ourselves. The complexity of pricing and so much different technology, which we absolutely don't really need, will eventually lead to we start hosting things ourselves. Oh yeah, and privacy of course :)
shermheadryder 6y ago
> S3: File storage. Not directly used for mounting, but you can directly download files from HTTP. S3 is an object store, not a file system.
urek_mazino 6y ago
Nice

1668 points by jaytaph 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jchw 6y ago

Useful and interesting but some of them are either blank or, well: > After reading it over and over again, i still have no idea what it does. > Some quantum thing. It’s in preview so I have no idea what it is. > in preview so no idea.

jaytaph 6y ago
Yes.. some of them I have absolutely no clue on what it does. They might serve some edgecase specific for that domain. There are a few services in preview which I cannot see for myself what it does. I will try to update and correct services as soon as I have more info (or somebody can provide it to me)
- mariodiana 6y ago
  No one dast blame this man.
- skriticos2 6y ago
  Indeed. One of the entries like this is a dedicated robot infrastructure service (like, managing real robot hardware that does something out there - think delivery robots). Certainly out of the usual software domain. They also collaborate with a few different quantum computer companies that do different approaches to quantum computing (gate based and annealing) which is an entirely separate field of science and most likely out of the usual comfort zone of most IT people.
- marz157 6y ago
  Hey, dev here for Robomaker. Most relevant line from our overview page is probably "AWS RoboMaker is the most complete cloud solution for robotic developers to simulate, test and securely deploy robotic applications at scale." The main feature is the on-demand cloud hosted version of the robotics simulator gazebo ( http://gazebosim.org/ http://gazebosim.org/ ) that allows you to run your robot's code in a 3d physics environment. You can then take that tested/verified code and deploy it over the air via our fleet management features to your actual robot.
  - jaytaph 6y ago
    THanks.. will update this

superasn 6y ago

This can be a good cheat-sheet and no wonder there have been so many attempts at this(1). Maybe we're better off making this as github page where users can send pull requests and add/rewrite to these. (1) https://netrixllc.com/blog/aws-services-in-simple-terms/ https://netrixllc.com/blog/aws-services-in-simple-terms/ (2) https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/

wegs 6y ago
I'd prefer to see this integrated into the AWS UX. For an external crowd-sourced version, I'd like to see something like this with a column for maturity, and whether it actually works. The classic AWS services are rock-solid, and perfectly sufficient to build a business on. Many of the newer ones are.... much less so. A green checkmark, yellow question mark, and red land mine icon would go a long way towards letting me know what I should and shouldn't use.
- imglorp 6y ago
  > integrated into the AWS UX Sure, it should be right in the headline of the service's "about" page. The fact that people need this at all is UX problem. If people are reading your "about" page and nobody understands what the hell your thing does, maybe your marketing, faux-tech, word salad is pointless.
  - Frost1x 6y ago
    >The fact that people need this at all is UX problem. Is it a UX problem or is it intentional deep branding to further promote vendor lock-in? This is one reason I've been opposed to AWS since the early phases--I don't want to learn all of their stupid branded vendor-specific nomenclature.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      If you are any sort of real business, you already “locked in” to more than likely a dozen or more third party services. I worked at a company whose entire workflow was tightly integrated into Workday via APIs, not to mention SalesForce. If you have ever worked in healthcare, the level of “lock-in” that they have to their EHR/EMR and various other third party services. would make you cry.

panpanna 6y ago

Well this was really useful. I didn't knew cloudfront was an Amazon product. I wonder what cloudflare people think of that.

detaro 6y ago
> I wonder what cloudflare people think of that. Because of the name? Cloudfront is older then Cloudflare afaik.
- panpanna 6y ago
  Didn't knew that. Given the discussion few months back, I thought maybe this was one of those lets-copy-our-costumers-business we-already-know-everthing-he-does things.
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
CacheFly is another CDN with a somewhat similar name ('CF'). I think they're all different enough that things are clear, though.

unixhero 6y ago

Useful, but it contains factual errors: >S3 File storage. Not directly used for mounting, but you can directly download files from HTTP. You most certainly can mount S3 buckets, and its done frequently in data pipelines throughout the industry[0]. >S3 Glacier Low cost storage system for backups and archives and such Sure but it would be good to include why there is a tradeoff in price, why is it low cost? For Glacier its intention is to provide storage, but rarely fetch data, as it is very slow. [0] https://github.com/s3fs-fuse/s3fs-fuse https://github.com/s3fs-fuse/s3fs-fuse

eterps 6y ago
How is that a factual error? It didn't say that mounting was impossible, just that it isn't directly used for mounting. How did you conclude that it's done frequently throughout the industry? What percentage of S3 customers do you think does this? If I would have to guess I'd say less than 1%. But I am happy to learn I am wrong.
- pfortuny 6y ago
  You are totally right, and your explanation is perfect. No need to bother. You could also mount gmail accounts as a filesystem.
  - unixhero 6y ago
    I beg to differ. I have already argumented against it, and provided evidence for my statement [0]. My argument is logically airtight.
- slau 6y ago
  Not OP, but my current gig is literally building streaming data pipelines on top of S3 using lambdas that only have a few hundred MBs of RAM to process gigabytes or more of data. S3FS is as close as it comes to mounting in my book.
matharmin 6y ago
It's a one-line summary, not an in-depth explanation or comparison. "Not directly used for mounting" is a good summary of the intended use.

celsocrivelaro 6y ago

Thank you so much :-). I have no ideia about some services, even reading the doc.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

speedgoose 6y ago

I see that AWS IoT Greengrass is missing. https://aws.amazon.com/greengrass/ https://aws.amazon.com/greengrass/ I may be wrong but from what I understood, it's more or less a way to manage AWS Lambda functions (cgi-bin scripts), Docker, and a MQTT client connected to AWS on your GNU/Linux devices (raspbian on a raspberry pi for example, or a x86 pc). However you still need Ansible or similar to manage the device so the actual value is kinda low because if you have a setup to manage the device, it's not much more work to manage docker and a mqtt client yourself. About running AWS Lambda functions on a the device, I think it makes sense for AWS to check the box "IoT edge computing with AWS Lambda" but unless you have a huge codebase in AWS lambda, it seems to be a bad idea. In one sentence : "vendor locked half baked IoT platform".

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
Aurora doesn't get a mention either. It's covered under RDS, but still, it seems worth an entry as a service they offer.
jaytaph 6y ago
The whole lot of IOT services are pretty confusing. Mostly because I have no experience with IOT/MQTT in general and it took a few days to actually figure out how to create and connect things (emulated). I actually bought some IOT devices (lamps, sensors) to try it out, but this turned out to be vendor-locked without any possibilities for MQTT. I reckon somebody with more experience in the IOT field could provide more insight in these things.
- dirktheman 6y ago
  Do your sensors/lamps use Zigbee? I use the excellent Zigbee2MQTT library and a DIY Zigbee sniffer. Now I can use most vendor-locked IOT-devices (Hue, Ikea Tradfri, cheapo Chinese stuff) in my Home Assistant without the need of a separate bridge. Check if your devices are supported here: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/information/supported_devices.html https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/information/supported_devices.htm...
  - 6y ago

v8engine 6y ago

Reminded me of these similar threads I read a while earlier: Azure: https://web.archive.org/web/20190321175020/https://www.expeditedssl.com/azure-in-plain-english https://web.archive.org/web/20190321175020/https://www.exped... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13442597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13442597 AWS: https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10202286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10202286

jaytaph 6y ago
I figured somebody has done this before. I purposely did not look for it to keep my findings unbiased. It was fun clicking on random services and tweak with it until figuring out what it was for and how to use it (and actually see some results)
dynamite-ready 6y ago
Would love to see an update to the Azure list.
philipodonnell 6y ago
Any update to the Azure list anyone has seen? 2017 is a long time ago.
- freeone3000 6y ago
  New Azure services tend to have names like "Cognitive Services Speech" or "Cognitive Services Image Recognition" or "Azure Stateful Functions"... There's not a lot to riff on.

kevsim 6y ago

This is really well done! I might tweak the Lambda one a little to mention what they run in response to or to even drop in the serverless buzzword.

highprofittrade 6y ago

Route 53 is too generalized

k__ 6y ago

"Large & scalable non-relational database (but not really a NoSQL system)" triggered

zambal 6y ago
Ha, that caught my eye too. I'd say DynamoDb is kind of the poster child of the whole NoSQL thing.
- jaytaph 6y ago
  Yes, you are right. I was thinking more about it not being a document-store like Mongo or couchdb. But I agree it's NoSQL.. will update

davedx 6y ago

Consider that your typical enterprise software project will use quite a lot of these, and that you pay for them all separately, and sometimes pay twice for them (e.g. S3 you pay for storage and for outbound bandwidth). It's quite a tour de force how Amazon have taken "separation of concerns", applied it to web services and used it to create complex and difficult to understand or predict pricing to print money. Bravo.

exhaze 6y ago
Have you ever used AWS? There's a whole suite of tools they provide around pricing and budgeting. > It's quite a tour de force how Amazon have taken "separation of concerns", applied it to web services and used it to create complex and difficult to understand or predict pricing to print money. Is applying separation of concerns to web services really that bad? Look, if you're a small company with a simple product, you can just put your stuff on a few EC2 boxes and pay the monthly bill for that. At that size, your infra costs are going to be dwarfed by your other costs of doing business anyway. If you're a big business, you can literally pay people to keep track of this stuff. You've got the extra money, because now you don't employ data center architects, server engineers, etc. AWS is able to "print money" because it brings a lot of value to many businesses.
- rumanator 6y ago
  > Have you ever used AWS? There's a whole suite of tools they provide around pricing and budgeting. They don't work. To elaborate, they fail to provide the user with information with enough clarity to allow him to form accurate mental models of what is being used,what it costs, and what is the implication in cost of applying some change. Heck, at any given moment it's unexplainably hard to tell exactly which AWS services are you actually using, and being billed for. The only reliable info on cost it the invoice you receive at the end of the month. Even then, the AWS guys felt the need to develop a full blown machine learning service to help customers predict what their next invoice will be.
  - exhaze 6y ago

robert_g 6y ago

There's an open guide[1] that's pretty useful. Amazon also publishes (at least some) documentation on Github[2]. [1] https://github.com/open-guides/og-aws https://github.com/open-guides/og-aws [2] https://github.com/awsdocs https://github.com/awsdocs

calmchaos 6y ago

AWS sounds like a good idea until you start calculating the cost of the setup with any kind of clustering and moderate data traffic.

pg-gadfly 6y ago
The compute is really a negligible part and one that you can severely effect. Outbound bandwidth is the real killer, going at ~$90/TB
- PetahNZ 6y ago
  Or RDS, which jumps from db.t3.medium, to db.r5.large.
- anonymou2 6y ago
  So you give them your data for free then you need to pay the ransom money to get it back?

s_dev 6y ago

Similar to https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ Why does AWS use such convoluted language? Is it because they're dominant and it adds friction to moving to another provider?

zxienin 6y ago
Because your enlightened state is in conflict with their commercial interest. Providing complex answers to simple questions, almost always is due to a need to hide sth.
- pg-gadfly 6y ago
  It reminds me of cult-speak, where everything has to be redefined according to some abstract higher level representation, even when it's simple.
  - ImaCake 6y ago
    This is typical in finance. Many of the financial "instruments" are given funny nouns that hide the true character of what they are (usually shitty loans, or stocks being sold at a mark-up).
cm2187 6y ago
Same with Azure. Even when I understand what it does, I am baffled of how they came up with the name.
ben509 6y ago
I think it's because naming things is hard, that link proves it by coming up with worse names for almost everything they tried to rename, and often far, far worse. Imagine the confusion if S3 were called "Amazon Unlimited FTP Server." That gets every word wrong, except that "Amazon" is merely redundant. It's not unlimited (having to pay for a thing is a limit), it's not using FTP, and it's a service, not a server. Or if VPC was "Amazon Virtual Colocated Rack". A "colocated rack" means your computer in their datacenter. They actually have this service, it's called Direct Connect, because you can actually Lambda does require you've got some vague notion of what lambda notation is. But "AWS App Scripts" suggests it's for mobile "apps", but it is not specific to those. And it suggests it's only for scripts, but you can run an entire application on Lambda just fine. Or even DynamoDB. They recommend "Amazon NoSQL." They're not offering many NoSQL databases, just their proprietary one: DynamoDB. They have a service that offers many relational databases and that is called Relational Database Service.

mraza007 6y ago

This is useful.

fauria 6y ago

Similar to "Amazon Web Services In Plain English": https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english Seen on HN (2015): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10202286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10202286

unilynx 6y ago

Cool list! But I would just name "Lightsail" "Amazon's digital ocean"

drcongo 6y ago

It's sad that this is so necessary, but I'm still confused by the very first two lines of this list. > EC2 Virtual Private Servers > Lightsail Amazon’s hosting provider (vps, dns, storage) Both of these are VPS? EC2 has no storage? Absolutely not a criticism of your list, more a comment on how baffling AWS is these days. I stopped using AWS once they hit the point where I couldn't reasonably be expected to remember what all the three letter acronyms were. I still occasionally have to use it for S3, Route53 and IAM - but every time I log into the console I find that they've removed them from my "pinned" services in the menu bar and I have to pin them again. Even this tiny detail is enough to make me not want to have to deal with that * 1000 by taking up more of the services.

OJFord 6y ago
Well, to EC2 you attach storage from another AWS service. I've not used Lightsail, but from the description I imagine it's a more 'single package, quickstart' service mirroring the experience you might get from a PaaS like DigitalOcean/Scaleway/Vultr/etc. vs. the IaaS style provisioning of compute & storage independently.
jitix 6y ago
EC2 requires you to specify the attached storage to it, giving you more options; lightsail doesnt. Lightsail is more like the ye'old VPS services.
callamdelaney 6y ago
I think pinned items are on a browser basis - because I logged into another account on the same browser and it had the same pins as my other account, without me setting them.
- drcongo 6y ago
  I only use Safari for any actual browsing, I've not noticed this happening, just that whatever I pin is gone next time I log in. Maybe it's short lived cookie.
scarface74 6y ago

nojito 6y ago

How to waste money in just one line each... Simplifying AWS like this only serves to normalize wasteful spending on the "cloud". This works when the economy is great....not so much when businesses are looking to trim costs.

scarface74 6y ago
Yes I’m sure you know every single vertical and business model well enough to know whether it’s a “waste of money”.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

syats 6y ago

Is there something similar for Apache projects?

adwww 6y ago
Ha good luck explaining in one sentance the difference between Flume, Spark, Storm, NiFi, Camel, Apex, Flink, Beam.....
- faizshah 6y ago
  I’ll try. Heres what u should know from these: Fast, Reliable, Stream Processing - Flink Data Science on Big Data - Spark Reliable Distributed Log Aggregation - Flume Low Code Data Flows w/ GUI - NiFi Zapier for Enterprise Software - Camel A Single API for Batch and Stream Jobs. Execute on Spark, Flink, managed services etc. - Beam Never heard of anyone use Apex over Flink. Storm community has branched off into Flink, Spark Streaming, Heron and Cloud Dataflow. Explaining Spark vs Flink is quite hard tho.
  - yazaddaruvala 6y ago
    From the little I know, Spark was built as a Batch job solution. Flink was built as a Streaming solution. Since Spark needed to adapt, they leveraged micro-batching to operate as a streaming solution. They are very similar today. Maybe some remnants of the original design make Spark "slightly less appropriate" for pure streaming usecases, or possibly less able to iterate on future features/optimizations, but so-far that line of reasoning has been only speculation.
    - faizshah 6y ago
      So Flink differentiates in stream processing in two major ways: - Flink guarantees exactly once stream processing through a barrier checkpointing system. - Flink has very detailed APIs for handling state and doing stateful stream processing. Additionally, Flink has one of the most active communities in the Apache Software Foundation: https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-software-foundation-announces55 https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-softwar... In situations where you want to create a streaming application with persistent state you might choose Flink over spark streaming.

richrichardsson 6y ago

> VPC Create your own VPCs within AWS Not particularly helpful if you have no idea what a VPC is! Of course it takes 2 seconds to search this for yourself, but still.

wartijn_ 6y ago
Isn't VPC a wel known term? I guess the author just included that definition to make the list complete.
- jaytaph 6y ago
  I've updated it to "virtual private network" instead.
  - kube-system 6y ago
    You're never going to please everyone, but I think that might be confused with a VPN. Amazon simply describes it as a "virtual network"
  - richrichardsson 6y ago
    I think just expanding it would be more helpful. I had seen the term before and knew exactly what a Virtual Private Cloud was once being reminded what VPC actually stood for.
- richrichardsson 6y ago
  I had to look it up, even though I'd seen the term before I had forgotten its meaning.

jason0597 6y ago

Sometimes I sit back and wonder if Amazon makes these names so complicated on purpose. Hmm, now that I think about it more, maybe they had to come up with these weird names so they could trademark them?

foobarbecue 6y ago

Where's EBS?

jaytaph 6y ago
EBS is actually part of the EC2 service. It's not listed explicitly in the console service menu. So I did not add it. (same goes with loadbalancing, security groups etc)
- foobarbecue 6y ago
  Aha, I see.

lode 6y ago

Some corrections: AWS Outposts: Run Amazon services in your own datacenter (not on your own hardware) Storage Gateway: Virtual appliance to couple on-premises applications to storage in the cloud. (So it's no iSCSI (block) to S3 (object) but Block(iSCSI to EBS), File (SMB/NFS/S3 to S3), or Tape (iSCSI VTL)) Addition: VMware Cloud on AWS: Bare-metal, automatically deployed VMware clusters on AWS hardware.

jaytaph 6y ago
thanks. Fixed the first one. About storage gateway: as far as I could see (haven't tested it) you get a iscsi path which you can connect to from your own device. It uses S3 as the backend store for files from and to this device. Will try and take some more time to look into it (never used this myself)

harshaw 6y ago

I'll bite. At the very least I would describe S3 as an object store (object semantics) and EFS as POSIX file semantics with an NFS interface.

pwdisswordfish2 6y ago

All AWS services explained in one line: Overpriced, unnecessary or both.

tr33house 6y ago

a bit tangential: I think a lot of AWS customers would actually benefit by hosting on their own machines in a data-center. The tools (and hardware) out there have become so good that there's minimal benefit to hosting on AWS for more than 4x the price. A lot of DCs also accept shipments so that even makes things easier. The trouble is that we've been conditioned, as an industry, not to think for ourselves or dare question certain accepted norms/practices. AWS/Azure/GCloud is great for some but I suspect it's for a much smaller subset that we want to accept.

koheripbal 6y ago
That's what we (mid/small-sized company) with couple dozen machines. It is probably 10% the cost of AWS - but you do need to have at least one person that can handle the servers when/if there are issues. That one person only needs to devote maybe 2-5% of their time to it (once the systems are setup), so it's still a net gain.
- bcrosby95 6y ago
  Yeah, we use a mix of AWS and self hosted machines. We've had up to 40 servers with this method and devoted similarly trivial amounts of time to it. If you want it to be long term sustainable, you probably want at least 2 people that can handle it, so they can go on vacation. If your goal is to be the next billion dollar company, it probably doesn't matter that much. But if you're self-funding and need a sustainable business model from the beginning, there's a huge growth phase (mid-sized) where the cost savings from doing this sort of thing can be large enough to be worthwhile. I'm not sure why so many developers seem afraid of hardware. Back in the early 2000s it definitely felt more commonplace for developers to be able to deal with it. Maybe it's because we grew up having to deal with our own in the form of desktops. Nowadays it seems like lots of people just use a macbook. And that's their only exposure to hardware
  - scarface74 6y ago
    If you want it to be long term sustainable, you probably want at least 2 people that can handle it, so they can go on vacation. The fully allocated cost of two ops people in my neck of the woods is a little over $300K. That can buy a lot from AWS. I'm not sure why so many developers seem afraid of hardware I want to develop. Yes I’ve been around long before AWS was a thing, I had to manage servers, load balancers, and even an elevated “server” room with a SAN with whopping 3TBs of storage back in the early 2000s. But in my old age, my time is valuable. I’ve done the on call thing before where our database server went down in the middle of the night when the night operations crew was working. I won’t work for a company that is not on a cloud provider and doesn’t have a dedicated ops team. But, if you are a small company. Why are you spending a lot on AWS? Two EC2 instances behind a load balancer and a hosted database shouldn’t cost you over $500 a month and that includes a decent amount of traffic and miscellaneous other charges. Heck if you are that small, just use Lightsail and when you grow, peer your Lightsail VPC that you probably didn’t know existed to a real VPC.

andarleen 6y ago

basically, AWS is an ESB sold for parts. understanding this, is the first step in building a competing service.

erwincaco 6y ago

> Amazon Connect AWS version of ZenDesk Wrong. That should be "Amazon's Cloud-based Contact Center" > Pinpoint Create transactional emails based on templates. Pinpoint can do SMS and voice too.

jaytaph 6y ago
Isn't that what ZenDesk is too? Yes, pinpoint can do more.. Will update
- derision 6y ago
  and if I don't know what ZenDesk is, then you're just exchanging one confusing name for another
- nostrebored 6y ago
  ZenDesk is a CRM/ticketing system. Amazon Connect integrates with ZenDesk CRM.

minitoar 6y ago

Ah I was hoping this was going to pithy/comedic.

RedShift1 6y ago

This is a 100 x better than their website. I've actively walked away from Amazon products because I could barely make out what it really was and if I could use it for the application at hand. Many thanks!

rantwasp 6y ago
nowhere close to 100x. actually it’s worse than the aws names across the board. the names have a logic to them but I agree it’s intimidating to learn hundreds of things at the same time - so you don’t. you learn the bits and pieces you need. for example: EC2 actually comes from Elastic Cloud Compute. You have Compute in the Cloud which also happens to be elastic. S3 is Simple Storage Service. It’s a Service for Storing things. It’s simple because it’s just a key-blob storage. Route53 is obvious if you know what runs on port 53.
- teej 6y ago
  Cognito? Lightsail? Redshift? CodeStar? Athena? Polly? There are loads of AWS services that don’t follow any logic, they’re just distinct, easy to spell nouns.
  - notatoad 6y ago
    which i really appreciate when it comes to googling them for help with stuff. i can google "aws lightsail" and get results directly relating to what i'm looking for. have you ever tried to sift through the mess of seo marketing crap that comes back when your search term includes "VPS"?
  - dodobirdlord 6y ago
    Cognito is an identity service, “incognito” means unknown, “cognito” means known. Polly is a joke about how parrots talk, the service does text-to-speech. Athena is a goddess of wisdom, the service is for querying databases. The name is frequently some sort of silly inside joke. Except Fargate, that name means nothing...
    - 6y ago

013a 6y ago

> Lightsail: Amazon’s hosting provider (vps, dns, storage) Doesn't feel like accurate description for Lightsail, nor a useful one. Maybe something like "simplified deployment and billing for some AWS resources, including VPS, databases, DNS, and load balancers" (listing "storage" as something Lightsail does is kind of weird; of course, it does instance-attached block storage, you couldn't have a VPS without that. critically, it has no S3-like blob storage product, and I think that's what most people would associate the general word "storage" with, but maybe I'm wrong about that).

flurdy 6y ago
Sometimes I feel it is easier described by saying what its main competitor is. Lightsail is basically AWS' version of Heroku and App Engine. (i.e. a PAAS) I wish Google would also do this. Many times on GCP's website or at Google Next you try to decipher what the product is that they are talking about, then you realise "ah, it is their version of S3, CloudFormation etc". If they just had said that at the start... Of course, no company will do this, unfortunately.
- rubber_duck 6y ago
  I've seen companies post feature comparison charts listing competitors, they are very useful when switching from a different provider or discovering what the product does in terms of established player
- lost_name 6y ago
  Your statement made me wonder if someone else had done this, and sure enough I found something -- https://www.cloudcomparisontool.com/ https://www.cloudcomparisontool.com/ Look for "Object Storange" for instance and in the row will be links to all the competing services, so you could pretty easily do this to learn about competitors through the one you know... At least for the big players.
  - itsmeamario 6y ago
    Isn't this wrong? At Google's Storage options, it says Google doesn't have Backup or Disaster Recovery options. As long as I know, aren't those types into Cloud Storage - nearline and coldline object storage types?

mabbo 6y ago

> Kinesis Collect massive amount of data so you can do analytics (like ELK?) I would say a better description is something like "pay per use Kafka".

Ozzie_osman 6y ago

Would be really awesome if each row also included the open source equivalents.

rudolph9 6y ago

It seems there is a a lot of back and forth on this thread about AWS good/bad. On the one side, people seem offended people use AWS at all Which common it serves a need and generally does what it’s supposed to. On the other side it’s like Stockholm syndrome, do people seriously believe AWS is there for you and hasn’t trapped you in dependency of their services?

ak39 6y ago

Excellent! We need this for esoterically named Javascript frameworks too.

mekster 6y ago

Is there a list of all the AWS services and what the counterpart it may be for a self hosted open source solution? Seems many of the actual services may have one.

sudhirj 6y ago

Most sound about right except for Global Accelerator, which isn’t a way to run your apps on edges, it’s a way to route all your network traffic through the AWS edges. Make it a bit more reliable and faster, and has really cool load balancing and routing options.

tilolebo 6y ago

Very nice! I was surprised by 2 descriptions: Opsworks: I thought it was using Chef under the hood. Is it really Ansible? CloudWatch: it's actually so much more than logging, as it also provides timeseries, alerting and even scheduling. Not sure how to summarize this, though.

wraithm112 6y ago
Everything I've seen about OpsWorks is chef/puppet based. Ansible is not mentioned in the opsworks documentation at all. I think that's just wrong.

traeregan 6y ago

Here's the Google Cloud equivalent: https://github.com/gregsramblings/google-cloud-4-words https://github.com/gregsramblings/google-cloud-4-words

itsmeamario 6y ago
I came here with the hopes of finding something similar to GCP. Thank you!
topkeks 6y ago
That is an excellent list. There's also a guide that compares Google Cloud with AWS and highlights the similarities and differences between the two. https://cloud.google.com/docs/compare/aws https://cloud.google.com/docs/compare/aws

ibatindev 6y ago

Really loved Amazon Braket's explanation

mcv 6y ago

That's kinda useful I guess? But I still don't know whether I need EC2 or Elastic Beanstalk. And do I need still need Batch if I have one of the other two? Still, it's much clearer than Amazon's own pages about this.

afterwalk 6y ago
Agreed, a concise description of "why" and "when" would be more useful.

ct520 6y ago

Love it! Does anyone know if something similar for competitors? More specifically azure?

hundchenkatze 6y ago
I had this one bookmarked, I think it's originally from 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20190508145128/https://www.expeditedssl.com/azure-in-plain-english https://web.archive.org/web/20190508145128/https://www.exped...
- ct520 6y ago
  Awesome!!!!!!! Thank you

hagsh 6y ago

Although AWS Braket is just in preview it's pretty safe to say it is a Quantum Computer as a Service bundled with a framework to write you algorithm in (a la IBM Q and qiskit). The nice thing about it is that you have a choice between three hardware vendor, all featuring different architectures giving the ability to test superconducting, ion trap and annealing systems from the same place. I have no affiliation with this other than being a Physics/CS graduate with only one Quantum Computing course under my belt.

StevePerkins 6y ago

> Lightsail - Amazon’s hosting provider (vps, dns, storage) > Kinesis - Collect massive amount of data so you can do analytics (like ELK?) Based on some of these that I'm already familiar with, I don't think I would rely on these descriptions for the ones I'm not already familiar with.

archielc 6y ago
Couldn’t agree more.

kumarvvr 6y ago

Out of curiosity, as a solo developer, what would it take me to do on premisis server at home? I mean in terms of hardware and software stack.

Jach 6y ago

It'd be nice to include "year introduced" data as well. My AWS knowledge peaked sometime in 2012 after DynamoDB came out. I know a bit about newer things (like Lambda) but there's a lot of catching up to do...

vivekf 6y ago

The title should have been a computer science introduction to marketing terms

elchief 6y ago

I made this list for my buddy a while back. It's meant to be more humorous than exactly correct Route 53 - Holy shit! It's NSD WAF - Holy shit! It's modsecurity SES - Holy shit! It's Postfix Inspector - Holy shit! It's OSSEC GuardDuty - Holy shit! It's Snort Data Pipeline - Holy shit! It's Cron and Bash Athena - Holy shit! It's Prestodb Glue - Holy shit! It's Hive Metastore and Spark OpsWorks - Holy shit! It's Chef VPC - Holy shit! It's a VLAN Snowball - Holy shit! It's a truck full of hard drives CloudWatch - Holy shit! It's syslogd Neptune - Holy shit! It's Neo4j ElastiCache - Holy shit! It's Redis DynamoDB - Holy shit! It's MongoDB S3 Glacier - Holy shit! It's DVD backup EFS - Holy shit! It's NFS Elastic Block Store - Holy shit! It's a SAN Elastic Beanstalk - Holy shit! It's Apache Tomcat EMR - Holy shit! It's Apache Hadoop Elastic Cloud Compute - Holy shit! It's a virtual machine Kinesis - Holy shit! It's Apache Kafka QuickSight - Holy shit! It's Tableau

alexchamberlain 6y ago
> Neptune - Holy shit! It's Neo4j Neptune - Holy shit! It's Blazegraph https://blazegraph.com/ https://blazegraph.com/
- dkroy 6y ago
  It's sadly missing the RDF inferencing of Blazegraph though.
abc_lisper 6y ago
I am going to screenshot this for future reference
- julianeon 6y ago
  I copy and pasted it for you, to save you a click. Route 53 - Holy shit! It's NSD WAF - Holy shit! It's modsecurity SES - Holy shit! It's Postfix Inspector - Holy shit! It's OSSEC GuardDuty - Holy shit! It's Snort Data Pipeline - Holy shit! It's Cron and Bash Athena - Holy shit! It's Prestodb Glue - Holy shit! It's Hive Metastore and Spark OpsWorks - Holy shit! It's Chef VPC - Holy shit! It's a VLAN Snowball - Holy shit! It's a truck full of hard drives CloudWatch - Holy shit! It's syslogd Neptune - Holy shit! It's Neo4j ElastiCache - Holy shit! It's Redis DynamoDB - Holy shit! It's MongoDB S3 Glacier - Holy shit! It's DVD backup EFS - Holy shit! It's NFS Elastic Block Store - Holy shit! It's a SAN Elastic Beanstalk - Holy shit! It's Apache Tomcat EMR - Holy shit! It's Apache Hadoop Elastic Cloud Compute - Holy shit! It's a virtual machine Kinesis - Holy shit! It's Apache Kafka QuickSight - Holy shit! It's Tableau

FigmentEngine 6y ago

I built this https://moca.computingarchitectures.com/en/vendors/aws/ https://moca.computingarchitectures.com/en/vendors/aws/ as well as visual representation https://moca.computingarchitectures.com/en/~hello-world/ https://moca.computingarchitectures.com/en/~hello-world/

vladoh 6y ago

You are missing one of the really amazing services: Snowmobile (https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/). It is a real truck, that connects to your data center, copies up to 100 PB of data and drives back to one of the AWS data centers and dumps the data there...

capableweb 6y ago
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of hard-drives driving down the highway" or however the saying goes. Latency is extremely long, but the bandwidth is crazy once it's arrive! Edit: Original quote (seems I accidentally modernized it a bit): > Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway – Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981
kyawzazaw 6y ago
And the companion Snowball (https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/)

joshfraser 6y ago

Sometimes it pays to be boring. One of the hardest parts of using AWS is learning all their silly names for everything. I know it's tempting to be cute when naming things, but everyone else wishes you would just be clear and descriptive. I've seen this play out at startups that love to name servers after galaxies or cartoon characters. It's all fine until your new employee onboarding guide comes with a massive memorization test before you can be productive. Yes, db-master and db-slave are way more boring names than Saturn and Uranus, but do everyone a favor and express your creativity somewhere else.

sokoloff 6y ago
I think they went through a middle phase of cutesy naming, but this seems to have subsided some (to the good). Simple Queuing Service, Simple Storage Service, Elastic Compute Cloud, SimpleDB are names that very much make sense. Greengrass, Lightsail, not so much. EKS, Outpost, Ground Station, and Lake Formation are more toward the usefully descriptive side again, I think.
ggregoire 6y ago
Star Wars still seem to be the greatest source of inspiration for backend engineers when comes the time to find a name for a new microservice.
latencyloser 6y ago
I worked at a company that had names for all the conference and meeting rooms based on various science fiction names and other "nerdy" stuff instead of some sort of building-floor-room_number scheme. It was neat at first, but quickly became agonizing trying to remember what _building_ a conference room was in much less where in that building. It added an extra few minutes to every meeting for me where I had to either look it up on the internal wiki or go ask someone at the front desk where I was supposed to go or make sure at least one person nearby attending the meeting already knew where we were going. It took months to get the hang of for even the more routine rooms.

barry27 6y ago

"AWS DeepComposer Computer generated music. It’s as horrible as it sounds." it's so true. go to aws and find this deep mind composer. play twinkle twinkle little star. press 'generate composition'. now play it again. wtaf.

tlobes 6y ago

Tested Sumerian and it's a barebones 3D web tool (modeled after Unity but more akin to ThreeJS editor) that can be controlled via script by other services. One example is being able to do some tasks like in-browser AR.

aptrishu 6y ago

mediaconnect - to transport live video mediapackage - package live/on demand video content mediastore - store video assets for live/on demand video content

rijdz 6y ago

somebody please make something like this for azure please

windex 6y ago

Someone do this for Oracle and SAP's products list too please. It's a mess of marketing speak and no one has a clue. With SAP you dont even get to see the product in most cases. It's just marketing you have to make your buying decision on.

callmekatootie 6y ago

Does anybody know if we have something similar for Azure?

danielovichdk 6y ago

Soon we will all be back to hosting everything ourselves. The complexity of pricing and so much different technology, which we absolutely don't really need, will eventually lead to we start hosting things ourselves. Oh yeah, and privacy of course :)

shermheadryder 6y ago

> S3: File storage. Not directly used for mounting, but you can directly download files from HTTP. S3 is an object store, not a file system.

urek_mazino 6y ago

Nice