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Amazon Web Services in Plain English

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Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#171

Love 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.

I could but that would involve some editing — I stripped the content directly from the parent post!

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#173
"CodeCommit" (which I use and like) is _nothing_ like GitHub. There's no community. In fact, that's why I like it. Things basically default to locked down and private, non discoverable.

It's just an easy way to host Git repos on reliable servers with a nice permissions mechanism for authorizing users.

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice list. Disagree with many of them, though. EC2/"Amazon Virtual Servers" - true today, perhaps. But when EC2 first launched, they were trying hard to sell the "elasticity" and "pay for what you use" aspects, which were unique at the time. There were no EBS volumes, the storage was all ephemeral. While it was possible to use EC2 instances as virtual servers, that was really not what they were designed for. IAM/User…

> S3 is not an FTP service it is a distributed object store. Not really, the only "object" you can store, Amazon's language notwithstanding, is effectively a file. It's not like you could give it something that needed to be serialized. And it's hard to see how it's "distributed" when your bucket price varies "based on the location of your bucket" as Amazon puts it. It's probably more redundant than FTP, but saying S3…

> Not really, the only "object" you can store, Amazon's language notwithstanding, is effectively a file. It's not like you could give it something that needed to be serialized.

It's not "Amazon's language"...your thinking is too programming-language-centric. Object has a much more general meaning. Amazon didn't invent the term blob (binary large object) and S3 is basically a blob store.

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using FTP as shorthand is better than "Object Store", which sounds like the marketing BS this is designed to avoid.

Object store is what it is...FTP would be marketing BS implying something that the service isn't at all.

File store? I agree that "object" makes no sense when applied to S3. It's not like you can store an "account" object and call a method to get back the current balance, with accrued interest for the time since last deposit added in. Or even store an image and call a method to get back a black-and-white version. Etc.

IMNHO "File server" implies it exports an actual file-system, and would also be wrong. In that light, I think S3 is more like FTP than a "file server". Sure, it might technically be more like WebDAV than FTP, perhaps "FTP-like service using HTTP for transport" is more accurate -- but I'm not sure it's better than just calling it FTP...

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#177

DynamoDB is nothing like mongodb. Its more like a key/value database.

Actually we have a lot in common :).

In addition to KV pairs storage, DynamoDB supports querying, documents, indexing and streaming from a feature stand point and infinite provisioning/scaling from a infrastructure stand point. Give it a shot and ping me about any questions!

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#178
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Object store is what it is...FTP would be marketing BS implying something that the service isn't at all.

File store? I agree that "object" makes no sense when applied to S3. It's not like you can store an "account" object and call a method to get back the current balance, with accrued interest for the time since last deposit added in. Or even store an image and call a method to get back a black-and-white version. Etc. IMNHO "File server" implies it exports an actual file-system, and would also be wrong. In that light, I…

Hah...I mean I think it's a bit arrogant for OP to try and rename all of a company's services. Sure some of them are confusing and could be named better but Amazon is a trailblazer here with lots of these services becoming available on a cloud.

"S3 - Simple Storage Service" describes pretty well what the point of the service is without making strong claims around what it may or may not be. It's a service for storing things; it's not a database or a filesystem. The devil is in the details of course but even when I was really new to cloud services I got the gist of what S3 was supposed to do.

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