11 ms·
AWS Icon Quiz
- EricButton 3y agoLooks like i'm a noob
- blandai 3y agoLoll makes me feel like a bad engineer
- unregistereddev 3y agoIt's possibly a sign that you are a good engineer. If you are using infrastructure-as-code, whether that is terraform or cloudformation, you are used to looking at a yaml or json file that does not include icons. If you have automated everything to the point that you rarely need to log into the AWS console, you probably don't regularly see these icons.
- akira2501 3y agoThe only reason I can play this game is because "Icons with Labels" is impossible to deal with in the AWS console. I _really_ wish I could just set the labels myself. "AWS Simple Email Service." Were you worried I would forget it's an AWS service? Or worried that I wouldn't remember it's simple, or a service? Do you offer any other email service? Can I please just rename the label to "SES"? First world cloud console problems, I guess.
- mdaniel 3y agoand then there's "flip a coin" about whether it's "AWS Foo" or "Amazon Foo". I think I once read that Amazon Foos were things that were used internally, too, and AWS Foos were things only sold to pay for rocket fuel and yachts (I kid, I kid; paying for all those Graviton fabs is some serious $$$ too)
- ceejayoz 3y agoMy favorite is "Amazon Web Services Systems Manager Session Manager".
- mdaniel 3y agoYou surprised me for a second and I thought you had found an example of where they actually _wrote out_ Amazon Web Services in the title of something and I was going to claim they must get paid by the letter or something, but no, it's just "AWS Systems Manager ..." https://docs.aws.amazon.com/systems-manager/latest/userguide/session-manager.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/systems-manager/latest/userguide... Still, yes, a good r/TitleGore find there :-D
- hooverd 3y agoI think a Managed NAT Gateway or two ought to cover those.
- paulddraper 3y agoOddly, https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ continues that AWS/Amazon schizophrenia.
- yathaid 3y agoAWS ___ ones can only be used with the rest of the AWS ecosystem. Amazon ___ can be used as a standalone service. Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon S3, Amazon Chime etc. vs AWS CloudFormation, AWS CodeCommit etc.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> Do you offer any other email service AWS WorkMail is a (different kind of) email services, and AWS Simple Notification Service has email delivery functionality. So, yes?
- hooverd 3y agoIt's not a real AWS service unless there's a way to run containers with it.
- joshuawilde 3y agoMade it about 1 question in before I realized it was over my head
- gordian-not 3y agoSometimes it feels like having 2000 products with obscure names and overlapping responsibilities is the end goal
- mdaniel 3y agoI hope you got to see when the AWS InfiniDash (meme?hoax?) went around ... good times
- psanford 3y agoIs there no way to see the correct answers after finishing the quiz?
- chanux 3y agoSome comments say that the game tries to match AWS console usability, so probably not.
- fjuengermann 3y agoHaha that's impossible. They all look the same
- cdchn 3y agoClearly one icon is six cubes and another is seven.
- ajonit 3y agoThis reminded me of AWS in plain English https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/
- whatsthenews 3y agoThis is a hilarious blog. Honestly, it’s not just the icons but the names as well. A lot of them are completely unrelated to the product and make no sense
- neoncontrails 3y agoAmazon Drawer of Old Android Devices has a certain ring to it.
- morkalork 3y agohttps://i.redd.it/lzveac55vqb61.jpg https://i.redd.it/lzveac55vqb61.jpg
- mdaniel 3y agoYeah, ok, thanks "Entra" https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/fundamentals/new-name https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/fun... :rolling_eyes:
- morkalork 3y agoOh dear! I'm not even an azure user and I know what AD is and does. Why are they throwing out all their brand recognition for "Entra"??
- cdchn 3y agoI correct people on this daily just because I think its hilarious they changed the name.
- paulddraper 3y agoThe exception that proves the rule. But my goodness, what an exception....
- GabeIsko 3y agoDidnt they retire these in favor of the vector icons?
- alexy201 3y agoThe person that designed these icons should be paid less. Maybe Bezos did it himself
- EricButton 3y agoAmazon's strong suit has never been design apparently...
- rob74 3y agoThat applies not only to icon design, but also to UX design and some other types of design too...
- p410n3 3y agoI have red green color blindness (deuteranopia) and i have no idea if my answer is right or wrong on until i change my monitor settings to high saturation. (I usually turn that off because it messes a lot with other colors)
- kreas 3y ago^+1
- 8organicbits 3y agoDoes it show which one is correct when you get it wrong? It would be cool to see what all the others were too.
- jamesfinlayson 3y agoUnhelpfully it does not.
- globally 3y agogotta love aws ux
- scop 3y ago> 5/20 I use a variety of AWS services every day. I actually got a higher score than I was expecting.
- baz00 3y agoOh hell I have spent the last decade working with AWS and I still have no idea what any of the icons are. They are all complete shit. Literally the worst. To be fair I can't remember half the product names other than the core ones either. Elastic Banana or whatever. Maybe Dynamo Donkey. I just don't know any more. Edit: I'm also an AWS Architect Professional or whatever it's called now. Shows how a monkey can pass the certs eh?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- alexy201 3y ago[flagged]
- hughesjj 3y agoI worked at AWS for 7 years and only got 1/20
- askiiart 3y agoThat's almost impressive; you did 3x worse than random! Edit: nope, I have no idea. I forgot the number of options and type of questions varies quite a bit.
- giaour 3y agoI was the primary maintainer for one of the services they asked about, and I still got that question wrong. 4/20 for me, but three were lucky guesses
- nikofoto86 3y agoI actually think that AWS icons are pretty decent. If you’ve used GCP, you know what I’m talking about
- tehbeard 3y agoNot used GCP... Is it as bad as the "Google" folder on an android?
- dijit 3y agoGCP has a mix of "that makes sense" (scheduler, run, compute, spanner) to "I can see where they were going" (memorystore, speech) with a smidge of: "that doesn't make any sense/just a fun design that isn't meaningful" (anthos). Lots of icons are dots or squares that are connected, which of course isn't helpful because that's what nodes in a network actually are in all circumstances. GCP is (un)fortunately saved by it's relatively low product offering (by AWS's standards at least).
- paxys 3y agoI have not used AWS at that level, but are these actually real?
- jldugger 3y agoNot anymore. Pretty sure I ran into this quiz a few years ago. They moved away from the cubic logos, judging by my aws console.
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 3y agoI got 2/20 after randomly guessing.
- ece 3y ago4/20 noob, picked all As.
- rtkwe 3y agoWhere do these icons come from they don't match what's used in the AWS console at all. So many of these are weird because I mostly know of their icons from the main console page which apparently doesn't match the ones this quiz is pulling from because it said the S3 icon isn't green and the IAM icon is a key. In the console it's green and an ID with a lock icon on it at least for me.
- baz00 3y agoThey're used in the architecture diagrams and CloudFormation etc.
- rtkwe 3y agoAh ok. I've never used designer much at all so the fact they didn't match the AWS console version of things was really confusing. The first question is the 3 overlapping boxes with a play button which is supposedly the lambda icon but the console just has an orange box with a boxy white λ so I was never going to get that. Wonder if OP could make a version of this that uses the console icons instead of the designer icons..
- xcskier56 3y agoI think they may be an older AWS icon set. I was just doing making an infrastructure diagram in lucid chart and the S3 icon was red and I recognized it so I got it right, but it doesn't match whats in the console now
- rtkwe 3y agoThe other person has it right. It's the icon set used in Cloudformation Designer. Which doesn't even match their current icon asset packet for Powerpoint, those generally seem to use the ones used in the console from my limited survey. https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/icons/ https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/icons/
- bagels 3y agoShould they even have any icons? Most of them don't really convey meaning, and there are so many, and many similar (rectangular prisms in different orientations), that it's impossible to remember them.
- dragonwriter 3y agoThey need icons so that the utterly incomprehensible architecture diagrams that mostly would convey little useful information even if you recognized the symbols drawn by architects for administrative rather than technical reasons have the façade of a standardized, consistent language.
- bilalq 3y agoI've contributed and/or led development on at least 4 different AWS consoles and have used AWS every day for the last 10 years, with 8 of those working at AWS. Still only got 6 right on the quiz. That said, AWS is transitioning away from those 3D logos. I just wish they'd transition away from Amazon vs AWS name prefix confusion. I've read the internal notes on why they do that, but the reasoning never clicked for me and I still have no idea without looking it up.
- janestevenson80 3y agoI’m convinced the AWS icons were made by people who don’t realize how helpful names and icons can be for devs
- kodjima33 3y agojust realized I’m so bad at AWS
- hbn 3y agoIf you pass this, a team of medical professionals will be sent to your home to peacefully euthanize you, as it is the only ethical choice to end your suffering.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Traubenfuchs 3y agoI sense a business opportunity: Euthanasia as a Service. EaaS. With an API.
- cdchn 3y agoThe real question is: can I configure it with a CloudFormation stack?
- redserk 3y agoNo but a beta Terraform provider is available. Just don’t forget to import the existing resource lest strange things happen.
- benburleson 3y agoAhem, did you mean OpenTF?
- cdchn 3y agoTerraform doesn't make me want to use EaaS though.
- yftsui 3y agoNo, we provide a CDK L3 construct that ensures your best practice.
- grogenaut 3y agonow that's hot
- jedberg 3y agoI want to take this quiz, but why do I have to click three times to get to the next question instead of one?
- bemusedthrow75 3y agoPerhaps it's to match the class-leading usability of the AWS web console.
- speedgoose 3y agoIt’s to mirror the AWS user experience.
- pashabitz 3y agoI hope this is made by an obsessive graphic designer at AWS who's lost one too many arguments.
- jedberg 3y agoI've been an AWS Hero for a decade, and I only got 5 out of 20 (and I was only sure on 1, the other 4 were guesses). Obviously this is a joke to point out how useless the icons are, but I'd have thought working with them for so long I'd at least know a few of them.
- KrishnaMadala 3y agoCool quiz feels like it might be a psy op from https://www.antimetal.com/ https://www.antimetal.com/
- spaidenbeta 3y ago[flagged]
- dang 3y agoYou guys generated complaints from HN users about you spamming HN with booster comments and upvotes. I checked and the complainers were right. Doing this will get you banned here, so please avoid anything of the sort in the future.
- karaterobot 3y agoAs a designer, I just want to say that if your instinct is to rag on these symbols for being incomprehensible, go ahead and try your hand at one or two. It may be humbling. Illustrating abstract concepts that are similar to other, related abstract concepts is extremely difficult. Remember that it's got to be legible in a footprint of a couple dozen pixels on a side. When you're done, make sure it isn't close enough to any other AWS product symbols that customers would get confused. Also, run it by a committee of people who aren't designers, and are proud of that fact. If they are in a senior position, attempt to integrate their feedback, no matter how idiotic, into your design, because nobody's going to fight for a little thing like an icon symbol. I stopped making logos, it's a really difficult and thankless job. Designing apps for complex use cases is way simpler.
- xuhu 3y agoNot a fan of either, but Azure icons look like actual things: http://code.benco.io/icon-collection/azure-icons/ http://code.benco.io/icon-collection/azure-icons/ The AWS icons seem procedurally generated based on a hash of each concept's name.
- paulddraper 3y agoYeah, limiting yourself to minor variations of a 3x3x3 cube is pretty rough. GCP shows you can have strong brand consistency (even a limited color palette) while still having decent illustrations [1]. [1] https://www.turbogeek.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/word-image-4.png https://www.turbogeek.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/word-...
- bravura 3y agoI didn't expect this when I clicked on the comment thread, but yeah, GCP has the best icons and its design element is the secret hero of the story.
- racked 3y ago> I stopped making logos, it's a really difficult and thankless job. Just ask more money for it then :-)
- nnx 3y agoAWS should add this to their Certifications offering.
- cdchn 3y agoThey should add a higher tier and the test is just this.
- cdchn 3y agoThis is making me feel like I should turn in my Certified AWS DevOps Engineer badge.
- tristor 3y agoI don't know that I should be angry or relieved that I only got half of them right. I've been working with AWS since it existed.
- baq 3y ago[flagged]
- nathell 3y agoPretty much the only AWS logo I can recognize immediately is this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_Electoral_Action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_Electoral_Action
- srvmshr 3y agoI tried my level best and got 2/20. I repeated with random guesses and got 5/20. I have used AWS on-and-off since 2018. AWS icons are next to Egyptian hieroglyphs in difficulty. Google iconography isn't so bad (but bad enough still.)
- jamesfinlayson 3y agoAgreed - I've been working with AWS almost daily for the last four years and got 4/20.
- throwaway03635 3y agoI got 4 out of 20, but 3 were just lucky guesses. There was only one icon that I could guess from the context. The mobile analytics icon looked like a bar-chart and the other options were things like Kinesis and other services that didn't match the icon. https://app.awsiconquiz.com/_next/image?url=%2Fimages%2Fquestion_5.png&w=384&q=75 https://app.awsiconquiz.com/_next/image?url=%2Fimages%2Fques...
- rurp 3y agoThis was hilarious. Some of descriptions are great. "Dried arterial blood" is a nice vivid color descriptor. It really puts into context how meaningless these icons are. I log into AWS all the time and did terrible on this quiz (4/20), despite having seen some of these icons hundreds of times at least.
- nkcmr 3y ago> Dried arterial blood red ... Horrifying I got 3/20, because I've never used AWS professionally.
- frakt0x90 3y agoI got 3/20 and use AWS professionally
- ranman 3y agoNow do it with the 2021 icons
- flying_sheep 3y agoThat's why I think Adobe has made the smart move. They simply use English as the icon, color as the impression. You can guess via the English if you are unfamiliar with the icon. And easy to spot via the color if you already know the icon. Let's say if I forget the characters in the Illustrator icon. But I can recognize the icon is Illustrator because of its orange color.
- dylan604 3y agoI think Microsoft was even better, at least on the number of users that recognized the blue W for making documents the e icon to get online, etc. That's how my mom did it, but she would have no idea what Ps, Il, Ae, would mean
- Sohcahtoa82 3y agoAnd if you arrange the icons right on your task bar, you can make it spell lewd things.
- paulddraper 3y agoThat gets harder if you have 200+ products.
- mschuster91 3y agoNow if yEd had a way to search in the icon library... the way services are grouped is completely incomprehensible.
- marktani 3y agomy score was 5/20, every question in this quiz is uncanny :D
- tambourine_man 3y agoThis deserves a prize of some sort. Genius.
- paulddraper 3y agoHint for those who are struggling: Guess randomly to improve your score.
- rtkwe 3y agoFor people despairing about their ability to score on this quiz asking such simple things as what color is the S3 icon. The quiz is using the Cloud Formation Designer icons not the ones you see every day in the console or in the icon asset pack from the AWS site you might be using in your architecture diagrams. So unless you spend a load of time using that to build your CFTs rejoice you shouldn't be surprised you're getting them wrong since they are not consistent across those locations.
- jamesfinlayson 3y agoOh, I vaguely remember these icons being used in the UI but now the UI has flat and more brightly coloured icons.
- brianshaler 3y agoThank you. While they're familiar, I couldn't figure out where to go to see these cuboid icon variants. Spent a few minutes clicking around the Console and the AWS web site / marketing pages, and didn't encounter a single one. When I think AWS icons, I only know the AWS Console favicons and thumbnails in Console search results. I was perplexed when it offered ELB as an answer when I've only known ELB to exist within EC2 and share its icon.
- rtkwe 3y agoI was really confused too going through when I got to "What color is the S3 icon?" I was happy to finally get one and confidently answered green only to be told I was wrong. I even went to check the console and it was green, that's when I started wondering where they were pulling these from and someone else mentioned it.
- TurkishPoptart 3y ago>Your Final Score Was: 4/20 Skill Level: Noob What do people actually think of this UI? These icons give a futuristic but also depressing look at the same time.
- NBJack 3y agoCongrats, you just described Amazon as a whole. If anything, it is art imitating life.
- tgmatt 3y agoI got 9/20 and got called a noob - glad I'm not the only one that had a lower than perhaps expected score despite using AWS daily for years and years. Not going to miss those icons though.
- jldugger 3y agoRepost of the old google doc quiz? https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1026568631214198784 https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1026568631214198784
- 8note 3y agoHow do you actually come up with good icons for these things? I can imagine a few for things like sns, sqs, and lambda, but what's the right icon for kinesis?
- mdaniel 3y agomuch like comment elsewhere in this thread about Adobe's products, I bet one would get pretty far just using the initialisms for the service and then no one has to spend their precious braincells trying to map someone's fever dream icons for Iot-Blockchain-Whatever down to some triangles ______ | IAM | ------- ______ | EKS | -------
- NBJack 3y agoLet's also pick some broad high level categories and vary the border design and color too. Boom. Instantly better. Someone should make a Chrome plug in for this...
- myaccountonhn 3y agoOne issue is the uniformity of the icons, they could have different shapes and other visual cues so they don’t blend into eachother so much
- michellezzz 3y agoThe comments start my day with a lot of lol
- kretaceous 3y agoLove me some good satire. I don't work with AWS a lot but I thought I could probably score a few points by following their rules for their color coding: orange for compute services, blue for DB related, green for other service management related and red for storage. I got 6. Why tf is Route 53 the same colour as compute services?
- jdlyga 3y agoWe are excited to introduce the AWS Elastic Icon Identifier, a service designed to simplify your AWS Management Console navigation by quickly identifying AWS service icons. This service offers Icon Recognition, enabling you to instantly identify an uploaded AWS icon; an Icon Library with a continuously updated collection of AWS service icons; and API Integration, allowing you to programmatically identify AWS icons in your applications. Additionally, it ensures High Availability with extra redundancy layers and built-in Fault Tolerance to handle unforeseen issues without service impact. This not only accelerates the learning curve for new users but also helps experienced users efficiently identify unfamiliar icons or refresh their memory on lesser-used services. The pricing is designed to be cost-effective for all users, with a Free Tier of 100 icon identifications per month, a Pay-as-you-go plan at $0.01 per icon after the first 100, and a Premium Plan at $10/month for 1000 identifications, with extra identifications at $0.008 per icon. All plans include unlimited access to the Icon Library and API Integration, as well as High Availability and Fault Tolerance features at no additional cost. For more details, visit our Pricing page on the AWS website. Start simplifying your AWS experience with the Elastic Icon Identifier today!
- jimt1234 3y agoAWS Elastic Icon Identifier is just a fork of Open Icon Identifier. AWS does this shit all the time. LOL
- dudus 3y agoOpen Icon Identifier wants to move to a different license but are afraid of user reaction.
- throwaway03635 3y agoDon't worry, the original developer who started the project has a created a fork with the new license. They removed some of the enterprise functionality and has rewritten that part as a closed source product. The core will remain open source forever.
- Hamuko 3y ago
- NBJack 3y agoIt definitely feels like Amazon had some intern project that generated 'spatial catpchas' (prove you are human by picking the stacked blue boxes) and decided to re-use it for every icon.
- potato_database 3y agoThey also changed their icons quite a few times in the past... I agree though that they're bonkers
- ume 3y ago3/20 Have been using AWS since S3
- asciii 3y agoNow I am very curious about how AWS made their icons. I work in AWS everyday and can barely tell any part. I thought Google was terrible...