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Amazon Web Services in Plain English

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Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#191
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

It's not worthless terminology. It's a term that was chosen along time ago to distinguish this kind of storage architecture from filesystems and block devices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_storage.

This is a common issue in computer science and software development. Whenever new concepts are discovered or developed, they often need new names. You need to pick something that will distinguish this new concept from existing technologies. For laughs (kind of), look at configuration management software (Chef, Puppet, Cfengine, Ansible). They all quickly discovered that there were a whole bunch of new concepts that needed names, and while in some cases this hints that maybe these tools a bit over-engineered, it's hard to deny they've been popular and useful. Regardless, they all encountered these new concepts around the same time and they all made up their own names for them. So in chef you have cookbooks, where ansible has roles. Chef has roles where ansible has playbooks. Ansible has modules where puppet has providers and resource types. Ansible has tasks which are basically components of what chef would call a recipe and puppet would call a manifest.

All in all, I think "object storage" is a pretty fair term for the concept of a data store that neither heirarchical or sequential.

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Running a business on AWS is like taking Uber to work every day. At some point it makes sense to just buy the car. To make the analogy accurate: Running a business on AWS is like taking Uber to work every day. At some point it makes sense to just buy the car, hire a driver, find a good mechanic, lease a parking spot, purchase automobile insurance, remember to buy gas, deal with speeding tickets, schedule regular ma…

Empirically I've found that point to be at approximately the $30k/month spend rate (somewhere around 4-5 years in--arguably no longer strictly a "startup"). Of course it's pretty context-dependent, YMMV, etc.

For what type of service though?

Netflix spends millions on AWS -- but it would never make sense for them to do it themselves.

My average was ~$140K per month -- and it would NOT have made sense to do self DC.

Right now, im deploying from DC to AWS and dropping my cost and increasing my performance...

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#193
post #139
post #69

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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…

To really "go for the gold" you can add in other abstraction libraries for talking to clouds like http://www.dasein.org/ and https://jclouds.apache.org/

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#194

What should Lambda be called?

Ha, I also browsed through the list, curious to find the name for AWS Lambda. Perhaps it's omitted because it is tougher to find a good name? Amazon NoServer Computing? Amazon NoEC2?

Amazon NoEC2 is a hilarious name for lambda

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Just a simple find and replace: https://gist.github.com/nathancahill/a5761667e9d1d4377463

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#196

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…

Maybe Simply... "Amazon File Server" ?

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#197

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.

Would love to hear by what % your revenue increased today (or in the next month or so from lag time)

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#198

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.

Your list was discussed extensively in the office today and everybody loved it.

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#199

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…

How about "Web File Server"? I think mentioning "FTP" in the "It's like" column is reasonable, but I thought it was confusing in the name.
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