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Similar to https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ Why does AWS use such convoluted language? I

by 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.
- pdyck 6y ago
  Services like S3 are referred to as „object storage“. AWS Lambda is a service for „serverless compute“ or „function as a service“ (although it‘s debatable if these are good names for the concept). My point is that definitely are named for these concepts but AWS uses brand names which is quite confusing for people who are new to AWS.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    It makes it a lot easier to search for on Google though...
    - pas 6y ago
      Why? They could have simply named them with AWS Serverless, or AWS Compute, or whatever. Using these brand names might make it easier to evolve them later, or they really wanted nice sounding names because eventually you'd have to write out long phrases with the AWS prefix, and that's probably harder to market.
      - NikolaeVarius 6y ago
        Those names are extremely generic and each covers many completely different service offerings.
      - llbeansandrice 6y ago
        > AWS Serverless Which serverless? ECS Fargate? Lambda? Step Functions? There are tons of AWS services which are technically "serverless". Even S3 obfuscates away the server. https://aws.amazon.com/serverless/ https://aws.amazon.com/serverless/
        NikolaeVarius 6y ago
        Los Balancer = HaProxy Serverless
- Twirrim 6y ago
adwww 6y ago
This is one of the things I love about GCP. Kubernetes Engine, Compute, Storage, Memory Store, Cloud SQL, PubSub.... almost all of the main services do what they say on the tin. The only downside is - ironically - it sometimes makes googling for help a bit tricker. Eg. Are you search for generic cloud storage or the Google product with the same name?
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  It is kinda funny and heartwarming when you use Google to search for one of Google’s cloud products and the first result is some competitor.
scarface74 6y ago
I know the ins and outs of AWS pretty well, but when I see discussions about Azure or GCP, I’m completely lost. It’s not like I’m a stranger to the development side of the Microsoft ecosystem. I’ve been developing in C# for over decade and have used Visual Studio since 1997.
castlecrasher2 6y ago
>Why does AWS use such convoluted language? Is it because they're dominant and it adds friction to moving to another provider? Having gone from AWS in my last role to GCP in my current, I can tell you with 100% certainty that for me, AWS' mnemonic device naming convention is far, FAR more effective in helping me remember which service does what. S3? Storage. EC2? VM/compute. GCP's equivalent? GCS/GCE. I don't do a whole lot with VMs in my role but it takes me a few good seconds to remember "GCE" whereas EC2 is instantly memorable. Don't get me started on Google's many "Data X" services (Datastore, Dataproc, Data Transfer, Data Catalog, Data Fusion, Dataprep, Data Labeling). tl,dr; the lizard part of my brain very much prefers AWS' naming style, and I have a hard time remembering GCP's services despite the descriptive naming.
- toomanybeersies 6y ago
  I think that AWS offers more distinctive names, which helps experienced users a lot. EC2 is instantly recognisable as meaning Amazon's compute service, S3 is storage. GCE and GCS could stand for all sorts, Google brings up "General Certificate of Education" and "Glasgow Coma Scale" as the first results. I suppose because of this, Google tend to use the full name in most of their documentation. It does make learning how to use Google Cloud as a beginner a lot easier though.
stevievee 6y ago
To add: It might actually help with commercial sales - the obfuscation makes it seem like there is more to each product than it being a cloud-managed version of what is done locally.
victords 6y ago
My personal theory is that they made such a bad naming decision on their first service that they just committed to it and doubled down from there on.
wyck 6y ago
> Why does AWS use such convoluted language? Because it's run by engineers (not a bad thing).
unethical_ban 6y ago
I think "codenames" are easier to reference and discuss once you get immersed in the ecosystem. "lambda" vs. "serverless compute" - which one do you want to say 30 times a day?
- scarface74 6y ago
  Exactly, How long has the idea of “ubiquitous language” when talking about a business domain been around? Everyone technical at my company from the CTO down can have conversations and talk about CloudFront, API Gateway, Lambda, S3,SQS,SNS,DynamoDB, Aurora, Fargate, CodeBuild, CodePipeline, CloudFormation, IAM, WAF, EC2, ECS,ECR, Cognito, etc. I’ve seen developers come in and within 3 months it’s second nature.
nerdkid93 6y ago
> CodeCommit should have been called Amazon GitHub because Amazon can ignore trademarks? That would have been an entertaining lawsuit between Amazon and Microsoft though.
chapium 6y ago
Why is lemon sugar flavored carbonated beverage called Mountain Dew? Shouldn't the soda companies use less convoluted language? Why is Confluent not just called Kafka+? Why isn't Kafka called LinkedIn distributed subscriber service?
- rantwasp 6y ago
  and more importantly should diet mountain dew be called "lemon flavored carbonated beverage" or "lemon flavored sugar-free carbonated beverage"?
hinkley 6y ago
Probably because parallelization is not the end-all-be-all of management strategies. Consumers expect most companies to act like a coherent unit, (purportedly due to Dunbar's Number), and when you don't have enough oversight or leadership everything begins to look schizophrenic. "Self-organizing" is organized chaos. If nobody picks winners at the end it never stops being organized chaos.
zamalek 6y ago
> Why does AWS use such convoluted language? This is the exact reason I prefer Azure. I can use the search textbox to find something and the name is usually pretty explanatory (but they do have some daft stuff, like 3 different queue offerings with pretty vague documentation on the differences).

by s_dev 6y ago

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.

pdyck 6y ago
Services like S3 are referred to as „object storage“. AWS Lambda is a service for „serverless compute“ or „function as a service“ (although it‘s debatable if these are good names for the concept). My point is that definitely are named for these concepts but AWS uses brand names which is quite confusing for people who are new to AWS.
- scarface74 6y ago
  It makes it a lot easier to search for on Google though...
  - pas 6y ago
    Why? They could have simply named them with AWS Serverless, or AWS Compute, or whatever. Using these brand names might make it easier to evolve them later, or they really wanted nice sounding names because eventually you'd have to write out long phrases with the AWS prefix, and that's probably harder to market.
    - NikolaeVarius 6y ago
      Those names are extremely generic and each covers many completely different service offerings.
    - llbeansandrice 6y ago
      > AWS Serverless Which serverless? ECS Fargate? Lambda? Step Functions? There are tons of AWS services which are technically "serverless". Even S3 obfuscates away the server. https://aws.amazon.com/serverless/ https://aws.amazon.com/serverless/
      - NikolaeVarius 6y ago
        Los Balancer = HaProxy Serverless
Twirrim 6y ago

adwww 6y ago

This is one of the things I love about GCP. Kubernetes Engine, Compute, Storage, Memory Store, Cloud SQL, PubSub.... almost all of the main services do what they say on the tin. The only downside is - ironically - it sometimes makes googling for help a bit tricker. Eg. Are you search for generic cloud storage or the Google product with the same name?

dodobirdlord 6y ago
It is kinda funny and heartwarming when you use Google to search for one of Google’s cloud products and the first result is some competitor.

scarface74 6y ago

I know the ins and outs of AWS pretty well, but when I see discussions about Azure or GCP, I’m completely lost. It’s not like I’m a stranger to the development side of the Microsoft ecosystem. I’ve been developing in C# for over decade and have used Visual Studio since 1997.

castlecrasher2 6y ago

>Why does AWS use such convoluted language? Is it because they're dominant and it adds friction to moving to another provider? Having gone from AWS in my last role to GCP in my current, I can tell you with 100% certainty that for me, AWS' mnemonic device naming convention is far, FAR more effective in helping me remember which service does what. S3? Storage. EC2? VM/compute. GCP's equivalent? GCS/GCE. I don't do a whole lot with VMs in my role but it takes me a few good seconds to remember "GCE" whereas EC2 is instantly memorable. Don't get me started on Google's many "Data X" services (Datastore, Dataproc, Data Transfer, Data Catalog, Data Fusion, Dataprep, Data Labeling). tl,dr; the lizard part of my brain very much prefers AWS' naming style, and I have a hard time remembering GCP's services despite the descriptive naming.

toomanybeersies 6y ago
I think that AWS offers more distinctive names, which helps experienced users a lot. EC2 is instantly recognisable as meaning Amazon's compute service, S3 is storage. GCE and GCS could stand for all sorts, Google brings up "General Certificate of Education" and "Glasgow Coma Scale" as the first results. I suppose because of this, Google tend to use the full name in most of their documentation. It does make learning how to use Google Cloud as a beginner a lot easier though.

stevievee 6y ago

To add: It might actually help with commercial sales - the obfuscation makes it seem like there is more to each product than it being a cloud-managed version of what is done locally.

victords 6y ago

My personal theory is that they made such a bad naming decision on their first service that they just committed to it and doubled down from there on.

wyck 6y ago

> Why does AWS use such convoluted language? Because it's run by engineers (not a bad thing).

unethical_ban 6y ago

I think "codenames" are easier to reference and discuss once you get immersed in the ecosystem. "lambda" vs. "serverless compute" - which one do you want to say 30 times a day?

scarface74 6y ago
Exactly, How long has the idea of “ubiquitous language” when talking about a business domain been around? Everyone technical at my company from the CTO down can have conversations and talk about CloudFront, API Gateway, Lambda, S3,SQS,SNS,DynamoDB, Aurora, Fargate, CodeBuild, CodePipeline, CloudFormation, IAM, WAF, EC2, ECS,ECR, Cognito, etc. I’ve seen developers come in and within 3 months it’s second nature.

nerdkid93 6y ago

> CodeCommit should have been called Amazon GitHub because Amazon can ignore trademarks? That would have been an entertaining lawsuit between Amazon and Microsoft though.

chapium 6y ago

Why is lemon sugar flavored carbonated beverage called Mountain Dew? Shouldn't the soda companies use less convoluted language? Why is Confluent not just called Kafka+? Why isn't Kafka called LinkedIn distributed subscriber service?

rantwasp 6y ago
and more importantly should diet mountain dew be called "lemon flavored carbonated beverage" or "lemon flavored sugar-free carbonated beverage"?

hinkley 6y ago

Probably because parallelization is not the end-all-be-all of management strategies. Consumers expect most companies to act like a coherent unit, (purportedly due to Dunbar's Number), and when you don't have enough oversight or leadership everything begins to look schizophrenic. "Self-organizing" is organized chaos. If nobody picks winners at the end it never stops being organized chaos.

zamalek 6y ago

> Why does AWS use such convoluted language? This is the exact reason I prefer Azure. I can use the search textbox to find something and the name is usually pretty explanatory (but they do have some daft stuff, like 3 different queue offerings with pretty vague documentation on the differences).