Live data from Hacker News

Amazon Web Services in Plain English

expeditedssl.com

21–30 of 237 posts

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#27

Thank you for this. I can't wrap my head around why Amazon would make names for some very useful services so inscrutable. It's like the developers were put in charge of naming everything.

s/developers/sales/.

I think this comes from considering all those services as separate products. After all, today every product needs a distinguishable name, a logo, etc. /s

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#28
post #7

What's amazing is the amount of services Amazon offers. Whenever I look at my AWS console I see these reems of badly named services and I think to myself "after I've dealt with the current problem for which I've logged in AWS, I might get to figure out what all that other stuff actually is". However, I never do because there is more stuff to take care of, and since AWS doesn't make this easy to understand, you just d…

I understand where you are coming from. I'm just 'starting out' with a lot of this, despite a few years building/hosting websites, and these sort of services are the things I'm starting to look at. I'm completely disinterested in Amazon's offerings chiefly because they're so obtuse. Why should I expend so much cognitive load just figuring out what each service is and what it could do for me? It's undoubtedly possible…

Because when you figure out how to use them, you can save a tremendous amount of time and energy, and build sophisticated systems with simple code and little effort. When you have the need in a certain area, a lot of them will feel like "Wow, I didn't know that someone could automate this for me with so little effort compared to doing it myself". Most of it becomes increasingly valuable as you operate larger systems with many moving parts.

These AWS services are each solving a separate problem that people encounter, and usually embody a sort of "design pattern" like a distributed queue, or a load balancer, or a cache. Microsoft Azure and to a lesser extent Google Cloud Platform have similar lists of services (many services, each doing a different thing): https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/

It's really just like figuring out any other software ecosystem, though. If you stacked up a list of open source libraries or commercial libraries in a certain area, I'm sure it will feel the same. For example, so you want to get one application to speak to another over RPC. Well, you could use Apache Thrift, or Google Protocol Buffers, or Cap'n Proto, or Swagger.io, or SOAP or ASN.1 or I'm sure countless other things, and that's simply to perform the same task. What if you wanted a message queue? RabbitMQ, ZMQ, IBM MQ, ... I don't know if anyone has tried to put all of these on the same page and product matrix, or even keep track of them.

There's just a lot of stuff out there to learn and take advantage of. Being an effective software engineer in business is just as much about reusing existing stuff as it is about building new stuff from first principles. I'd say it's actually more about reusing stuff, since all other things equal it saves a lot of time. Don't build yourself or manage yourself what you can use for free or buy unless it's your core competency.

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#29
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand where you are coming from. I'm just 'starting out' with a lot of this, despite a few years building/hosting websites, and these sort of services are the things I'm starting to look at. I'm completely disinterested in Amazon's offerings chiefly because they're so obtuse. Why should I expend so much cognitive load just figuring out what each service is and what it could do for me? It's undoubtedly possible…

Because when you figure out how to use them, you can save a tremendous amount of time and energy, and build sophisticated systems with simple code and little effort. When you have the need in a certain area, a lot of them will feel like "Wow, I didn't know that someone could automate this for me with so little effort compared to doing it myself". Most of it becomes increasingly valuable as you operate larger systems…

I know you are right (of course), I just wish is wasn't so much of an upfront cost (cognitively).

I do think the page shared here is fantastic though and has changed my attitude somewhat towards AWS.

Post reply on HN