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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.

by teej 6y ago

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...
- core-e 6y ago
  I noticed you conveniently left out Redshift. :) What about Snowball, Chime, Sumarian, and Route 53?
  - rantwasp 6y ago
    Here is the redshift: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift#Doppler_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift#Doppler_effect It's a tongue in cheek about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift#Expansion_of_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift#Expansion_of_space and how
  - dodobirdlord 6y ago
    Somebody else gave the Redshift explanation. > Snowball It's like Glacier, but it's smaller and moves more quickly. I think this is one of the dumb-codenames-turned-real that crop up from time to time. Fargate is another notable example. > Chime A chime is a notification. That's about all I got. > Route 53 DNS runs on port 53, Route 66 is a famous highway. > Sumarian It's a really niche joke about the novel Snow Crash, that popularized the concept of digital "avatars".
  - scarface74 6y ago
    Redshift - Oracle’s brand colors are Black and Red. Redshift was built to help Amazon “shift” from using Oracle. Route 53 - DNS runs on port 53 Chime - when you want to talk about something “let me Chime in”. Snowball and Sumerian. I got nothing. I didn’t even know what Sumerian was until I looked it up and I thought I had at least heard of most AWS services.
rantwasp 6y ago
go to: https://aws.amazon.com/products/ https://aws.amazon.com/products/ look up your service. each service has a 1 line description that captures what it does. eg Athena = query data in s3 using sql i don’t really get why people cannot be bothered to learn what a service does and want to pretend they get it from the name. you need to learn the ins and out of the service. the name is the least of your worries.
- jonahx 6y ago
  > i don’t really get why people cannot be bothered to learn what a service does and want to pretend they get it from the name. you need to learn the ins and out of the service. Names matter. When your first experience with a product is an opaque name or description, it usually tells you one of two things: 1. The people behind it are not good communicators. If so, this will likely show up in many of the other product details: APIs, documentation, complexity. 2. The people behind it deliberately chose to be opaque. Perhaps they want to make the product seem more important than it is. Perhaps they thought marketing jargon would help sales. Etc. You seem to want to frame this in terms of developer laziness, but I don't think that's right. Both of these are often reliable signals. The criticism here is well-justified.
  - somestag 6y ago
    Yes, this is a huge problem throughout the industry. The tech world is gibberish. The real world is gibberish too, but the comparatively large number of tech products (because of the ease of releasing software) really exacerbates the problem in tech. Everything is a code name, in-joke, or initialism. If this were limited to public products then you could write it off as overly ambitious branding, but you can tell it's an issue because internal products suffer the same problem. You know it's bad when you can't even navigate your own company's hierarchy because you don't know what half the team names mean. Unfortunately, this will probably never change; there's too much precedent. Naming things incomprehensibly is fun, it creates a barrier to entry that makes developers feel smart, and the tech world doesn't value communication enough to change it. In a world where stackoverflow serves as de facto documentation for many major tech products because their own documentation is terrible, I hardly expect those same companies to value coherent naming.

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.

by 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...

core-e 6y ago
I noticed you conveniently left out Redshift. :) What about Snowball, Chime, Sumarian, and Route 53?
- rantwasp 6y ago
  Here is the redshift: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift#Doppler_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift#Doppler_effect It's a tongue in cheek about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift#Expansion_of_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift#Expansion_of_space and how
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  Somebody else gave the Redshift explanation. > Snowball It's like Glacier, but it's smaller and moves more quickly. I think this is one of the dumb-codenames-turned-real that crop up from time to time. Fargate is another notable example. > Chime A chime is a notification. That's about all I got. > Route 53 DNS runs on port 53, Route 66 is a famous highway. > Sumarian It's a really niche joke about the novel Snow Crash, that popularized the concept of digital "avatars".
- scarface74 6y ago
  Redshift - Oracle’s brand colors are Black and Red. Redshift was built to help Amazon “shift” from using Oracle. Route 53 - DNS runs on port 53 Chime - when you want to talk about something “let me Chime in”. Snowball and Sumerian. I got nothing. I didn’t even know what Sumerian was until I looked it up and I thought I had at least heard of most AWS services.

rantwasp 6y ago

go to: https://aws.amazon.com/products/ https://aws.amazon.com/products/ look up your service. each service has a 1 line description that captures what it does. eg Athena = query data in s3 using sql i don’t really get why people cannot be bothered to learn what a service does and want to pretend they get it from the name. you need to learn the ins and out of the service. the name is the least of your worries.

jonahx 6y ago
> i don’t really get why people cannot be bothered to learn what a service does and want to pretend they get it from the name. you need to learn the ins and out of the service. Names matter. When your first experience with a product is an opaque name or description, it usually tells you one of two things: 1. The people behind it are not good communicators. If so, this will likely show up in many of the other product details: APIs, documentation, complexity. 2. The people behind it deliberately chose to be opaque. Perhaps they want to make the product seem more important than it is. Perhaps they thought marketing jargon would help sales. Etc. You seem to want to frame this in terms of developer laziness, but I don't think that's right. Both of these are often reliable signals. The criticism here is well-justified.
- somestag 6y ago
  Yes, this is a huge problem throughout the industry. The tech world is gibberish. The real world is gibberish too, but the comparatively large number of tech products (because of the ease of releasing software) really exacerbates the problem in tech. Everything is a code name, in-joke, or initialism. If this were limited to public products then you could write it off as overly ambitious branding, but you can tell it's an issue because internal products suffer the same problem. You know it's bad when you can't even navigate your own company's hierarchy because you don't know what half the team names mean. Unfortunately, this will probably never change; there's too much precedent. Naming things incomprehensibly is fun, it creates a barrier to entry that makes developers feel smart, and the tech world doesn't value communication enough to change it. In a world where stackoverflow serves as de facto documentation for many major tech products because their own documentation is terrible, I hardly expect those same companies to value coherent naming.