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Amazon Web Services in Plain English

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Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#131

Post by joesmo »

PuffinBlue wrote: post #13
junto wrote: 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…

You shouldn't. I've spent months trying to figure out a few services to launch some apps and it's been a complete and utter waste of time. Yes, there are a lot of services, but the platform is incredibly buggy, the docs beyond unusable and unsearchable, and the customer support extremely slow. Not only that, but you'll get stuck in a proprietary system that's going to charge you many times what more traditional hosting options would. Here's a different experience that's probably very similar to what you'll go through: http://lucianux.com/blog/2015/08/26/aws:-i'd-rather-cut-my-o...

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#132

Post by Goladus »

decwakeboarder wrote: post #87
snorkel wrote: post #66

Whoa errors! * S3 is not FTP. It's more like static web hosting and storage. * VPC is not a "colocated rack" as it doesn't offer physical placement of hardware. Amazon VLAN would be a better name. It's just private network address space.

S3 (or any object store) "is like FTP" has been the best explanation I've used. Way too many people I've talked to think that it's a POSIX-compliant filesystem and "like FTP" is familiar enough to them to know that treating it like a standard filesystem is a terrible idea.

Yeah but just because a flawed analogy happens to work for people who are completely clueless about S3, doesn't mean you should deliberately misname your service to accommodate this lowest common denominator.

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#133

Post by joesmo »

mattmanser wrote: post #90
kevindeasis wrote: post #55

It took me forever to understand what each services aim to do. Like I could have literally been a better programmer by spending all the time learning algorithms instead of figuring out what each of the aws services do. I wish I've had access to this post before. I like the services they offer, I just really hate the names they gave it. Funny enough, Jeff Bezos said in an interview that names of a product is important…

You've got a nasty shock coming then, you'll spend far more time scouring badly written documentation about something that is supposedly simple but just doesn't work and once you've got working you'll never, ever use again until you've forgotten everything and then you need to set it up again and you'll have to go through the whole soul destroying process again but the documentation you find is now out of date, why-g…

Your first paragraph is a perfect description of working with AWS.

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#134

Post by stephenr »

benihana wrote: post #52
stephenr wrote: post #32

Let me preface this by saying I use AWS only when clients insist on it. I think there are much better options that don't lock their customers in anywhere near to the same level. I think AWS has plenty of badly named services, but some of these suggestions are much worse worse (and have a huge American influence - that fascination with using brand/implementation names for a generic/standard item) than the current actu…

So, if I understand this right, you're getting really really worked up at a slightly tongue-in-cheek post that tries to explain AWS in a way that's relateable to a lot of programmers. And you're upset because the words used in this post, which is about explaining Amazon's services to people who are familiar with similar services, wouldn't be a wise choice for Amazon to actually use, since it's too familiar with their…

I wouldn't call this worked up or upset.

The post claims to have "better hames" for the AWS services. Many of those names are much worse.

Take the suggested "Amazon Beginning Cut Pro" which was their suggestion for "Elastic Transcoder".

"Beginning Cut Pro" is clearly a reference to Apple's NLE, Final Cut Pro. I would suggest that there are literally zero people on the planet, who would use Amazon's video transcoding service (I imagine it's essentially a distributed ffmpeg queue.) to process video files before importing them into FCP.

This isn't "tongue in cheek", this is "stupid and confusing as an attempt at a laugh". I mean, what if I suggested that a hosted Memcached service be called AppStart because it uses memory and Apps use memory.

> having something to translate back to things I can understand was really helpful

My issue is that several of the services covered, already have a MORE MEANINGFUL name. So if I had no idea what "Elastic Transcoder" did, but it was instead called "Amazon Beginning Cut Pro", I would then assume it's somehow a tool meant to work with FCP, and disregard it (I don't need a NLE, at most maybe I need something akin to ffmpeg, so I can transcode/scale video files between formats automatically and efficiently.

If it's comedy, call it comedy, and make it actually funny.

If it's meant to be a useful guide, make it fucking accurate, or it's worse than what AWS is doing already.

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#135

Post by Goladus »

code_sterling wrote: post #81
snorkel wrote: post #66

Whoa errors! * S3 is not FTP. It's more like static web hosting and storage. * VPC is not a "colocated rack" as it doesn't offer physical placement of hardware. Amazon VLAN would be a better name. It's just private network address space.

Whoa pedantry. It's fine the way it is.

No, calling it Amazon FTP would be both misleading and incorrect, and is a very bad idea.

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#136

Post by stephenr »

err4nt wrote: post #73
gldalmaso wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to add: * Amazon Unlimited FTP Server: you can't really interact with S3 using a ftp client

Both of the most popular FTP clients for Mac and Windows that Ive seen developers using have fantastic support for S3! http://cyberduck.io https://panic.com/transmit/

That is completely irrelevant.

They also support SFTP, and WebDAV too. Are these protocols all the same thing now, just because some apps support multiple protocols?

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#137

Post by bkeroack »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #54
timclark wrote: post #9

"It's like: Stacking cash on the sidewalk and lighting it on fire" Is an accurate description of a large number of products that I have been forced to use after various CTOs have played golf with a vendors sales team.

I've found that nearly any use-case of AWS is like "stacking cash on the sidewalk and lighting it on fire". It's very overpriced and there's a lot of smoke and mirrors involved in figuring out how much you're paying. Disclaimer: I work at Linode, but have felt this way since before I started.

Running a business on AWS is like taking Uber to work every day. At some point it makes sense to just buy the car.

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#138

Post by err4nt »

stephenr wrote: post #136
err4nt wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of the most popular FTP clients for Mac and Windows that Ive seen developers using have fantastic support for S3! http://cyberduck.io https://panic.com/transmit/

That is completely irrelevant. They also support SFTP, and WebDAV too. Are these protocols all the same thing now, just because some apps support multiple protocols?

How is it irrelevant?

FTP is a protocol, but people use FTP in a variety of wrong but commonly understood meanings:

FTP Server = Hard drive accessible via FTP, not the server on that machine running the protocol

FTP Program = a file-management interface that uses FTP protocol to send commands

HTTP is also a protocol, though 'web browsers' can browse other protocols, as well as offline files.

Saying that an FTP Client that contains support for S3 is a misnomer is like arguing that accessing a file from your desktop using a 'web browser' isnt correct since you arent browsing any web.

The list is aimed at demystifying the confusing terms for the layman, its not aimed at providing the most technically correct taxonomy (since that would also not communicate much to the layman)

When I use my FTP client for SFTP am I using FTP or SSH?

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#139

Post by seiji »

wspeirs wrote: post #69
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #67

Hey HN, I wrote this, thanks for all the feedback. In particular if I've mischaracterized the functionality of a service or you see something that's really off please email me at mike@expeditedssl.com or just tell me here and I'll fix it.

This is great... well done. Any chance you could side-by-side it with Azure & Google Cloud's offerings? That would be MASSIVELY useful!

Holy Rosetta Stone Grail of Infrastructure as a Service: combine this document, include other provider offerings in the grid matching features, then also include the compatibility list from libcloud (https://libcloud.readthedocs.org/en/latest/supported_provide...) so we can understand how everything can easily be used together.

Sounds like a good fit as an open source documentation project for a dedicated group of platform researchers to knock out collaboratively in a month.

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