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

AWS services explained in one line each

adayinthelifeof.nl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 355 posts

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#171

Post by lost_name »

flurdy wrote: post #152
013a wrote: post #138

> Lightsail: Amazon’s hosting provider (vps, dns, storage) Doesn't feel like accurate description for Lightsail, nor a useful one. Maybe something like "simplified deployment and billing for some AWS resources, including VPS, databases, DNS, and load balancers" (listing "storage" as something Lightsail does is kind of weird; of course, it does instance-attached block storage, you couldn't have a VPS without that. cri…

Sometimes I feel it is easier described by saying what its main competitor is. Lightsail is basically AWS' version of Heroku and App Engine. (i.e. a PAAS) I wish Google would also do this. Many times on GCP's website or at Google Next you try to decipher what the product is that they are talking about, then you realise "ah, it is their version of S3, CloudFormation etc". If they just had said that at the start... Of…

Your statement made me wonder if someone else had done this, and sure enough I found something -- https://www.cloudcomparisontool.com/

Look for "Object Storange" for instance and in the row will be links to all the competing services, so you could pretty easily do this to learn about competitors through the one you know... At least for the big players.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#172

Post by choward »

drcongo wrote: post #50

It's sad that this is so necessary, but I'm still confused by the very first two lines of this list. > EC2 Virtual Private Servers > Lightsail Amazon’s hosting provider (vps, dns, storage) Both of these are VPS? EC2 has no storage? Absolutely not a criticism of your list, more a comment on how baffling AWS is these days. I stopped using AWS once they hit the point where I couldn't reasonably be expected to remember w…

> I couldn't reasonably be expected to remember what all the three letter acronyms were.

Just remember if you see an "S" it means simple. That means if you can't understand it you must be an idiot. S3 is one of the least simple things I've ever used.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#173

Post by toomanybeersies »

castlecrasher2 wrote: post #86
s_dev wrote: post #31

Similar to https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ Why does AWS use such convoluted language? Is it because they're dominant and it adds friction to moving to another provider?

>Why does AWS use such convoluted language? Is it because they're dominant and it adds friction to moving to another provider? Having gone from AWS in my last role to GCP in my current, I can tell you with 100% certainty that for me, AWS' mnemonic device naming convention is far, FAR more effective in helping me remember which service does what. S3? Storage. EC2? VM/compute. GCP's equivalent? GCS/GCE. I don't do a wh…

I think that AWS offers more distinctive names, which helps experienced users a lot. EC2 is instantly recognisable as meaning Amazon's compute service, S3 is storage. GCE and GCS could stand for all sorts, Google brings up "General Certificate of Education" and "Glasgow Coma Scale" as the first results.

I suppose because of this, Google tend to use the full name in most of their documentation. It does make learning how to use Google Cloud as a beginner a lot easier though.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#174

Post by faizshah »

adwww wrote: post #64
syats wrote: post #58

Is there something similar for Apache projects?

Ha good luck explaining in one sentance the difference between Flume, Spark, Storm, NiFi, Camel, Apex, Flink, Beam.....

I’ll try. Heres what u should know from these:

Fast, Reliable, Stream Processing - Flink

Data Science on Big Data - Spark

Reliable Distributed Log Aggregation - Flume

Low Code Data Flows w/ GUI - NiFi

Zapier for Enterprise Software - Camel

A Single API for Batch and Stream Jobs. Execute on Spark, Flink, managed services etc. - Beam

Never heard of anyone use Apex over Flink. Storm community has branched off into Flink, Spark Streaming, Heron and Cloud Dataflow.

Explaining Spark vs Flink is quite hard tho.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#175

Post by wraithm112 »

tilolebo wrote: post #167

Very nice! I was surprised by 2 descriptions: Opsworks: I thought it was using Chef under the hood. Is it really Ansible? CloudWatch: it's actually so much more than logging, as it also provides timeseries, alerting and even scheduling. Not sure how to summarize this, though.

Everything I've seen about OpsWorks is chef/puppet based. Ansible is not mentioned in the opsworks documentation at all. I think that's just wrong.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#176

Post by ken »

ashtonkem wrote: post #139
davedx wrote: post #26

Consider that your typical enterprise software project will use quite a lot of these, and that you pay for them all separately, and sometimes pay twice for them (e.g. S3 you pay for storage and for outbound bandwidth). It's quite a tour de force how Amazon have taken "separation of concerns", applied it to web services and used it to create complex and difficult to understand or predict pricing to print money. Bravo.

I'm always amazed at the complexity of AWS billing. "Why does this cost so much" turns out to be an incredibly hard problem to answer the moment you don't have 100% perfect discipline when it comes to resource tagging. The fact that there are consultants who specialize in figuring out AWS billing was, in retrospect, a warning sign.

I'm as anti-AMZN/AWS as anyone these days, but to their credit, Amazon has their own teams of consultants who will come to your business for free to analyze your usage of AWS and tell you how to save money. They openly joked about how it was their job to get customers to spend less money with their company.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#177

Post by zaidf »

doorstar wrote: post #165
ashtonkem wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always amazed at the complexity of AWS billing. "Why does this cost so much" turns out to be an incredibly hard problem to answer the moment you don't have 100% perfect discipline when it comes to resource tagging. The fact that there are consultants who specialize in figuring out AWS billing was, in retrospect, a warning sign.

I've been horrified at how bad this is on Azure, I'm sorry to hear that AWS has the same issue. I've signed in some mornings only to discover that I've been charged $20 for a MongoDB instance that's been sitting idle all night. Support can only come back with some hand-waving about RUs, a term that defies any clear definition.

This is a problem across enterprise SaaS companies. At my last company (small enterprise SaaS biz "why did I get billed $x for this?" so a five year old could understand.

I wish there were SaaS products that would effortlessly audit enterprise SaaS bills with support for more than just the top 1% SaaS products.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#178

Post by chickenpotpie »

notyourwork wrote: post #132
davedx wrote: post #26

Consider that your typical enterprise software project will use quite a lot of these, and that you pay for them all separately, and sometimes pay twice for them (e.g. S3 you pay for storage and for outbound bandwidth). It's quite a tour de force how Amazon have taken "separation of concerns", applied it to web services and used it to create complex and difficult to understand or predict pricing to print money. Bravo.

When every company workload and footprint is entirely different what alternative do you propose? Different companies have different needs and different cloud services suffice those needs in really different ways. You can run your database on relational, non-relational or flat text file backends. They all have different performances characteristics and different costs associated with running them.

Not to mention that if AWS doesn’t price everything correctly someone will find out how to abuse it. For example, if AWS only charged for outbound bandwidth on S3 I could store petabytes of archives for almost free. If they only charged for storage, I would host all my high access, small size files on there for free. S3 is an oversimplification but it applies to other services. If they don’t charge for every way they can lose money on a service, someone will find it out and abuse it.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#179

Post by Twirrim »

ben509 wrote: post #59
s_dev wrote: post #31

Similar to https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ Why does AWS use such convoluted language? Is it because they're dominant and it adds friction to moving to another provider?

I think it's because naming things is hard, that link proves it by coming up with worse names for almost everything they tried to rename, and often far, far worse. Imagine the confusion if S3 were called "Amazon Unlimited FTP Server." That gets every word wrong, except that "Amazon" is merely redundant. It's not unlimited (having to pay for a thing is a limit), it's not using FTP, and it's a service, not a server. Or…

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has been trying really hard to make sure things are named in as straightforward a way as possible. It was a very early decision pre-launch, and unsurprisingly not that hard to stick to. Marketing people didn't argue, either, but maybe that's a difference between the marketing team backgrounds? Enterprise company CIOs etc. don't want to have a translation guide when it comes to making purchasing decisions.

Some of the "WTF, how did they come up with that name" with AWS comes entirely down to the public name being the internal project name, e.g. Snowball. Various engineers and managers have facepalmed hard when marketing decided to go with the easiest option and use that name rather than come up with something meaningful.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#180

Post by doorstar »

zaidf wrote: post #177
doorstar wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been horrified at how bad this is on Azure, I'm sorry to hear that AWS has the same issue. I've signed in some mornings only to discover that I've been charged $20 for a MongoDB instance that's been sitting idle all night. Support can only come back with some hand-waving about RUs, a term that defies any clear definition.

This is a problem across enterprise SaaS companies. At my last company (small enterprise SaaS biz "why did I get billed $x for this?" so a five year old could understand. I wish there were SaaS products that would effortlessly audit enterprise SaaS bills with support for more than just the top 1% SaaS products.

I was poking around with their CLI to see if I could put together a cron job - this artifact now costs more than $X so delete it. Unfortunately if there's a 'get current charges' command I haven't found it.

I have a ticket open with MS support. I suppose it's to their credit that they're listening to me but it's been a few weeks with only the aforementioned hand-waving. I started just sending them screenshots showing that their own dashboard showed no usage during the times I'd gotten charged.

Post reply on HN