The SWF description is pure garbage; it's got nothing to do with EC2, or IronWorker at all. Oddly, I think it's named sanely - it lets you setup and manage a workflow using small bits of code.
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Amazon Web Services in Plain English
151–160 of 237 posts
Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English
#152Love this! Loved it so much I made it into a tampermonkey script: https://gist.github.com/ideasasylum/2d7518611ffaacbc5061 So now my Amazon dashboard looks like: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/iko1p8jdwdvjpaq/2015-09-...
Nice! You could save a good amount of space in the names by dropping the "Amazon". It's cleaner.
Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I wouldn't want to be around you when you're actually worked up.
I found it both funny and useful. But I can see where you're coming from. If I wanted something fucking accurate that goes into greater fucking detail than 1-2 mostly tongue-in-cheek sentences I'd go to the fucking source.
Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now re-read your first paragraph in light of the second one. Sometimes, it really is easier to just implement something your self than go through the "soul destroying process" of figuring out how to correctly set up and configure a library, framework, or piece of open source infrastructure. Not an algorithm, but it can be a lot easier to write your own SQL, for example, than setting up and configuring Spring and Hibe…
> Sometimes, it really is easier to just implement something your self than go through the "soul destroying process" of figuring out how to correctly set up and configure a library, framework, or piece of open source infrastructure But then the next person to look at your code has completely 0 support, rather than the very little support they'd have from the crappy documentation and stack overflow if you used an open…
Yes, if you do what jimbokun suggests you're definitely doing it wrong.
Edge cases will consume months of development instead of spending a day or two wrestling with poorly written error messages or badly documented APIs.
The one I always hit in .Net development is logging, log4net and elmah are both abysmally poor at documentation, but incredibly easy once they're actually set up.
Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
What layman who can't understand ftp is a protocol and doesn't mean any kind of storage, needs to understand the meanings of aws services?
If you're using sftp you're using ssh. It doesn't matter if your client also talks to ftp servers.
Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only real resemblance at all to FTP is that you use GET and PUT instead of filesystem commands. I mean, I guess if you really don't understand what FTP is and have no desire to understand how S3 is different from posix, then saying you have to use S3 like you use FTP kind of works. But it would be misleading to everyone else. > It's probably more redundant than FTP FTP is a transfer protocol , it says nothing abo…
Using FTP as shorthand is better than "Object Store", which sounds like the marketing BS this is designed to avoid.
FTP implies a specific protocol.
"File Server" or something like that would be better. You're quite right that "Object" is worthless terminology in this case - "Object" is basically nerdspeak for "thing".
Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English
#157Nice one:
Machine Learning
Should have been called
Skynet
Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English
#158Nice one:
Machine Learning
Should have been called
Skynet
Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English
#159Hey 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.
I would have preferred if some of the full comedic ones were toned down because this has some use. The amount of AWS services is hard to keep track of, especially considering when they have a bunch of slightly different solutions to a similar problem, is quite staggering. E.g. I want to deploy my code - should I use Ops Works, Pipelines, CodeDeploy, Ec2 Container Service, Elastic Beanstalk, Elastic Breadstick, CodePizza, blah blah blah?
> SWF -> Amazon EC2 Queue Use this to Build a service of "deciders" and "workers" on top of EC2 to accomplish a set task. Unlike SQS - logic is setup inside the service to determine how and what should happen.
I do not find this one to be that helpful, as "deciders" and "workers" doesn't make sense in this context. Logic isn't encapsulated inside of SWF, and the workers do not need to be hosted on EC2. SWF basically tracks workflow and activity versions, and is essentially a state management and work distribution system. It distributes out tasks to polling workers based on what the workers are polling, and what state is currently in SWF.
I think a (possibly) better name/use this to would be Amazon Task Orchestrator/Schedule and run jobs that do a bunch of things in order that can be distributed, where you want to run the workers on either EC2 or your own machines.
Ok, maybe not too much better, but I think it shows the use case a little bit better.
Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English
#160Hey 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.
Thanks for the document, it's fantastic. One thing that would help for me would be spelling out what the actual amazon acronyms mean. For example: EC2 - Elastic Compute Cloud. Also a link from the amazon acronym to the official page at amazon would be helpful.