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Amazon Web Services In Plain English (2019)
- fouc 5y agoS3 "Should have been called Amazon Unlimited FTP Server"
- najmlion 5y agoYeah that's what it says...
- 123pie123 5y agonot as complete, but see also https://gist.github.com/miglen/f6eef81803a43dad434d https://gist.github.com/miglen/f6eef81803a43dad434d for AWS and GCP side by side in plain english
- nokya 5y agoThanks for the share. I actually find your link more useful than what the OP offers. If anyone finds the same with azure also, I'm interested.
- v8engine 5y agohttps://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
- collsni 5y agohttps://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/aws-professional/services https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/aws-prof... Azure to AWS
- Traster 5y agoSome of these are clearly deliberate obfuscation. I need something to handle Queues, what should I use? Amazon SQS obviously. Oh cool, what’s that? It’s a Queue service! Oh great, why is called SQS? Simple Queue Service duh! Is there a more complex queuing service? No. There’s only SQS. The acronym is totally useless, tells you nothing beyond it being for Queues and completely obfuscates what’s happening for anyone not in the eco system.
- staticassertion 5y agoI mean, what would you call it? It's basically a 'push/pop' interface with timeouts. Like, do you think 'Kafka' is more descriptive? Or Prometheus? Or any of the essentially randomly generated names that various projects and products choose? By the standard of tech names SQS seems, relatively speaking, extremely descriptive.
- dijit 5y agoAmazon Queue Service. Or pubsub.
- flatiron 5y agoHaving them start everything with “Amazon” would put them in the “kde” league of everything stupidly starting with k for no reason other than to start with k.
- calvinmorrison 5y agoKuqueServive
- dylan604 5y agoyeah, but intentionally misspelling words to include a silent 'k' is a fun gimmicy thing. GNU does similar do they gnot?
- 411111111111111 5y ago
- staticassertion 5y agoWhat's in a name? Really, is "Amazon Virtual Servers" much better than "Elastic Compute" ? Maybe slightly. But at the end of the day you have to go look at it and see wtf that means no matter what, and the 'elastic' verbiage is fairly consistent across AWS products. IAM is similarly not that bad - Identity Access Management pretty much tells me what it is. When we have a field where things are named in extremely unclear ways - kubernetes, docker, kafka, prometheus, etc etc etc - these really don't seem that bad by comparison.
- cntrmmbrpsswrd 5y agoI think everything you said just pointed out how bad it really is in the field. You either have an acronym, which people assume you know, or nonsense words. Boring descriptive names are better, but don't look as good when marketing the product (I'd assume).
- detaro 5y agoWhat's a boring descriptive name that people wouldn't want to turn into an acronym for "Identity and Access Management"?
- ljm 5y agoThey're products, sometimes even brands, so I'm not sure why this requirement for clarity is needed. It at least helps differentiate projects in the same space. If I want something to provision infra I could go for Chef, Puppey, Ansible, Terraform. Or is it better for me to write my Infrastructure as Code setup using Whitespace Significant Serialization Format?
- fnord77 5y agomaybe it's an issue with my neurology, but for me if the name isn't descriptive it takes me longer to make association between the name and what it actually is. with "Virtual Servers", I would have only had to look it up once. With "Elastic Computer" it took me months of rereading what that service was for it to sink in.
- adambatkin 5y agoIAM "Should have been called Users, Keys and Certs" That's funny. Because we have hundreds of developers using AWS every day, using IAM all the time, and never using a single IAM User. IAM is actually named extremely well. identity and Access Management. I can't think of a better name. And if your problem is that you just don't like acronyms, you probably picked the wrong industry.
- stingraycharles 5y agoAgreed. “Users, Keys and Certs” neglects the whole roles / permissions aspects of IAM, which in my experience is by far the larger part of IAM. The users & keys part is actually just a tiny part of it.
- dylan604 5y agoIt just shows that someone is writing something from their personal perspective and thinks the rest of the world should conform to their view points. Also, it really sounds like a recent cloud "convert" trying to make hay as a thought leader (which is a phrase that makes me want to hurl), all the while revealing their ignorance as not fully understand the topic at hand. In other words, typical blogosphere crap (even though this isn't really a blog, just a syndrome).
- pfarrell 5y agoI just realized. Is it a play on the phrase “I am”? If that’s obvious, it just clicked with me after using AWS for ten years.
- georgyo 5y agoIdentity and Access Management existed as a term long before AWS. They called the feature the same name as what people called what that feature does.
- dylan604 5y ago>And if your problem is that you just don't like acronyms, you probably picked the wrong industry. Maybe they should try the military? I hear they only use acronyms occasionally!
- chrisan 5y agoVPC: Amazon Virtual Colocated Rack What in the world? Why would I want a rack in the world of a cloud. I want a virtualized private cloud, which not so oddly is named Virtual Private Cloud. I feel like the person who wrote this got into web dev back when I started in the 90s, then never left the time frame. This dude, much like this webpage, clearly have not kept up with the times
- anonymoushn 5y agoWhat is a virtualized private cloud?
- lukevp 5y agoA colocated rack is a much more limited concept than a VPC. VPCs let your architect an entire network. You can have multiple private and public subnets, set security groups to filter traffic between them, do service discovery, use policy based access control, health check load balance, and host PaaS entities into the network (like Aurora serverless). On top of that, you can flex your compute. VPC is more like a rack with a firewall, an f5, a smart switch with vlans, something like kubernetes to automatically scale compute… but there are things that aren’t even possible in a rack because you can transparently both manage your own compute with ec2 and add PaaS managed offerings like RDS, elasticsearch, kafka, etc. all to the same network.
- Spivak 5y agoThe last bit doesn’t make a whole lot of sense because AWS is all hosted in racks. It’s just that people don’t typically set up virtualized networking that way. We did and it was fantastic. All of our “environments” were overlay networks spanning our hypervisors and we provided “ops” services outside those networks just like AWS where they just got an interface in the environments. I'm convinced that there is no other way to manage networks after this. The ops team has their own completely separate view of the infrastructure that can be managed, moved, and shifted around so long as you keep the fiction the same.
- kubanczyk 5y ago
- stone-tech 5y agoThis is great ! Thanks
- notwedtm 5y agoThis feels like it was written by a late 90's sysadmin who just teleported to 2021 and has no idea how things operate today.
- daptaq 5y agoSometimes I feel like that too, which is why I appriciate these kinds of articles.
- sundvor 5y agoI actually read the whole piece as a humorous way of giving you an overview of some of the key AW services. I had a pretty good laugh at least, and thought it did a good job of it. :)
- jleader 5y agoExactly. When I read "Amazon Unlimited FTP Server" i heard a modem handshake sound in my head.
- user3939382 5y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27948093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27948093
- michaelbuckbee 5y agoThis was scraped and reposted from the original at https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/
- nacs 5y ago@dang Can you change the URL?
- hn_throwaway_99 5y agoThe problem I have with these renamed is that by "simplifying" the name, they often cut out major pieces of functionality. The original names are at least "brandable" so that when I think of that name, I think of the entire suite of functionality. Some examples: 1. IAM -> Users, Keys and Certs. But other commenters have already pointed out this leaves out the whole roles, permissioning and policies that is really the core of IAM. 2. S3 -> Amazon Unlimited FTP Server would imply to me that S3 actually just follows the FTP protocol, which is totally false. 3. Lambda -> AWS App Scripts. I have news for the author, but I know some companies and architectures that use Lambda as a basis for an entire serverless infrastructure, a heck of a lot more than "little scripts", e.g. serving whole websites. 4. Cognito -> Amazon OAuth as a Service - except many companies use it to store plain user accounts (e.g. username and password), not just setting up OAuth for accounts managed elsewhere. 5. SNS -> Amazon Messenger. But SNS can be used for a lot more than just sending emails, texts or push notifications. For example, it can be used to trigger lambdas. "Notification Service" seems to much better encompass the generic nature of the notification handling that SNS provides.
- chrsig 5y agoI can certainly agree that some of those descriptions don't fully encompass what you're getting. Some of your points are more picking at the authors choice of simplifying language, rather than the effort to simplify the names themselves. Some of the names are completely uninformative though -- cognito for example doesn't convey anything about oauth. Neptune doesn't make me think graph database. Kinesis doesn't make me think distributed log. Redshift doesn't make me think analytics database. I think my personal issue with aws naming is that they've run out of three letter acronyms. So I have to remember is EKS the kubernetes service, or the hosted kafka service?
- dylan604 5y ago>Some of the names are completely uninformative though Does Microsoft make you think computer OS? Does Apple make you think of computers and personal devices? Do common names Alexa/Siri mean anything specific to you? None of the words used in those examples have anything to do with what they do, but they are now synonymous with everything you think of when those words are spoken/written. That's because the companies have spent time developing them as brands. AMZN through AWS has just come up with names so that they can be discussed more easily. They haven't really spent time with ad agencies running lifestyle campaigns for them. I also think it falls into "I don't use something enough to fully remember what it does". However, is anyone reading this really not aware of what S3 does? EC2? Those are the basics where pretty much anyone starts with. Sure, not everyone will need EKS and it becomes more esoteric, but people that do it day-to-day know exactly what EKS is.
- skottk 5y agoThe comparison of AWS WAF to Sophos could not be more misleading. It’s an engine for building a limited set of HTTP exploit detections, and has nothing to do with endpoint protection whatsoever.
- SavantIdiot 5y agoI'd like someone to do one of these for Policies. Every time I need to tweak an IAM or an S3 or a permission, I have to write a policy. I never quite know what I'm doing, but I get it to work. I'd really like a hand-held walkthrough of why policies are written that way, and how to write one without accidentally footbulleting myself.
- mrfusion 5y agoI still don’t get beanstalk? A drop in replacement for heroku?
- jmcgough 5y agoHeroku is a good comparison. Beanstalk is a way to specify the resources you need without needing to understand aws very well - AWS automagically provisions things for you and replaces instances when they become unhealthy. Compare to CloudFront, which as the declarative way to specify what you need but requires you to know AWS in depth.
- Matthias247 5y agoI think you mean CloudFormation, not CloudFront?
- StratusBen 5y agoIt's a bit early to mention this as its still in the works but we're trying to take the same premise of explaining complex things in "plain english" but specifically for AWS billing terms and concepts here: https://handbook.vantage.sh/ https://handbook.vantage.sh/
- jaredsohn 5y agoFortunately, the AWS UI usually allows you to search for these services using text from what this says things 'should have been called'.
- grangerg 5y agoI read the title and first expected some satire like this: Imagine you're being taken on a "backstage tour" of the Internet. They open the door, turn on the lights, and as the distinct odor of decay and the chaotic scene of confusion and disarray greet you, you hear the guide blurt out, "Ah, crap! Who made this mess?! I swear it was presentable just a little bit ago! Well, good luck getting ME to clean this up! OK folks, we're outta here!" And THAT is AWS in "plain English".
- Animats 5y agoThat's useful, since Amazon itself doesn't seem to offer a one-page table of their offerings.
- miga 5y agoThis one page is like a half of the AWS certification. The other half is best learned by porting services from competitors to AWS and back again. Can you please add Azure and GCP service names too?
- naveen99 5y agoDoes aws have anything analogous to Microsoft’s azure free tier where you have some free quota monthly ? https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/free-account-faq/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/free-account-faq/
- jrockway 5y agoGoogle seems to have adopted the simpler naming scheme ("Cloud Storage", "Cloud SQL", etc.) and it honestly doesn't help much. Imagine you have some application that can write to various providers' object storage implementation. The user has to configure that somehow, and what do you call the configuration keys? In the AWS case, it's easy -- "S3_BUCKET". With Google, you end up having to use an incredibly long name. "STORAGE_BUCKET" -- too general. "CLOUD_STORAGE_BUCKET" -- too general (there are many clouds). "GOOGLE_CLOUD_STORAGE_BUCKET" -- there you go. Type that in all caps without a typo. (It's unclear to me whether or not "GCS" is an acceptable acronym for Cloud Storage. I think I use "GCS_BUCKET", but I'm also pretty sure I just made that up.) Google's acronyms also just all blend together for me. GCP has GKE which uses GCE instances. The entropy is not high enough for me to parse that unless I pronounce every word that the letter is standing in for. Meanwhile, "AWS has EKS which uses EC2 instances". More entropy, more comprehensible. I don't think any of this really matters much, but I also don't think that being generic and simple is necessarily the end game.
- ChrisArchitect 5y ago(2015) rip of other article (https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/) and ancient Plenty of discussion over the years: Original 2015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10202286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10202286 2017 where the author repeats that this is old https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13442022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13442022 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18475518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18475518
- posharma 5y agoIs there something like this for Azure?