Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon Web Services in Plain English

expeditedssl.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 237 posts

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#221

Post by stephenr »

athrun wrote: post #143
stephenr wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of medium sized companies would work out better off overall, with a skilled Ops person to setup cost effective services > Competing against Amazon, Microsoft and Google for talent doesn't sound like a smart strategy. You don't have to compete. They are trying to make a profit . You just need to be better off, long term. That could be a mixture of lower service fees, more flexibility, improved productivity, les…

I don't see how a single "skilled ops person" can deliver "lower service fees, more flexibility, improved productivity". On the other hand, Cloud Computing will, by definition, let you turn on and off services based on business demands. It doesn't get much more flexible and cost effective than that. "You just need to be better off, long term ." - This is a good one. Do you really think your homegrown Docker environme…

Set it up well, and train dev staff to understand what monitoring notifications mean. I mean, you are monitoring your services hosted on AWS right?

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#223

Post by dclowd9901 »

Goladus wrote: post #217
matt-attack wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So when I download a file from a website, I'm not actually downloading the file? Since it doesn't become a file until it gets flushed to disk by my browser? So what is the name for the sequence of bytes that are actually downloaded?

So what is the name for the sequence of bytes that are actually downloaded? If you explicitly requested your browser to create a file, then it could be any kind of data. If the web server triggered the download, your browser probably saw an HTTP header like "Content-type: application/octet-stream" I will admit that there is an abstract concept of a "file" that exists outside the restricted realm of a "filesystem," bu…

Your distinction well-noted, a file server still makes a great name for the service, considering its end purpose is serving files, and the fact that it's a "service" implies an interface of sorts apart from a standard file system.

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#224

Post by stephenr »

ins0 wrote: post #53
benihana wrote: post #52

Earlier 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…

Exactly what i was thinking about as i submited this. Don't read this article as a "They should rename the Services to..." and more like "This name would explain the Service in a simpler form". Thanks for reading my mind btw :)

Simpler or easier to recognise by some, but wrong is hardly better.

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#225

Post by stephenr »

martiuk wrote: post #49
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…

What would you suggest as an alternative to AWS?

That's like me asking you "what car do you suggest?" without telling you what I want to use it for, how big my family is, or where I live.

I have no idea what your business does or what services you need, but there are plenty of other vendors from simple rented virtual machines up to full co-lo of customer owned hardware. The good ones will rely on good customer satisfaction rather than artificial vendor lock-in to remain profitable and competitive.

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#226

Post by inopinatus »

colordrops wrote: post #22

What should Lambda be called?

I think it is a pretty strong reference that many programmers understand, and speaks volumes about the execution-model-as-value-proposition: "Just give us a piece of code, we'll do the rest". I'd say it's up there with Glacier and CloudFormation as an evocative product name.

There is a category violation in the name since, arguably, AWS Lambda functions are not true anonymous functions, having ARNs to identify them. If only I could save environment state along with the code function (e.g. for injection of runtime secrets); it'd be AWS Closure.

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#227

Post by schrodinger »

Goladus wrote: post #135
code_sterling wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I disagree. It gets the point across to me, and is presented in the right manner for me to not take it literally.

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#228

Post by Goladus »

tjr wrote: post #148
Goladus wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I did not read the article as literally suggesting that Amazon change the name of its service, but rather, as a means of conveying the crux of the idea behind the services. I also did not take this particular description to indicate a literal FTP service. Analogies do not have to be perfect to be helpful. I've never used Amazon web services, perhaps partly because I found their terminology too obfuscated to bother tr…

I did not read the article as literally suggesting that Amazon change the name of its service

Neither did I. But it's flawed even as a rhetorical device. For that kind of thing to work for me, it would have to at least be plausible.

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#229

Post by Goladus »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #223
Goladus wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what is the name for the sequence of bytes that are actually downloaded? If you explicitly requested your browser to create a file, then it could be any kind of data. If the web server triggered the download, your browser probably saw an HTTP header like "Content-type: application/octet-stream" I will admit that there is an abstract concept of a "file" that exists outside the restricted realm of a "filesystem," bu…

Your distinction well-noted, a file server still makes a great name for the service, considering its end purpose is serving files, and the fact that it's a "service" implies an interface of sorts apart from a standard file system.

It would except for the fact that "File Server" has been a commonly used term for a long time that hadn't ever been previously used to describe the technology that S3 actually is: an eventually-consistent distributed object store with a simple network API.

It's not like "Simple Storage Service" is weirdly obscure or anything.

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#230

Post by Goladus »

schrodinger wrote: post #227
Goladus wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I disagree. It gets the point across to me, and is presented in the right manner for me to not take it literally.

Not to me. The absurd lack of plausibility and simply erroneous analogy makes the whole rhetorical technique distracting and misleading rather than funny and insightful.
Post reply on HN