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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?
because Amazon can ignore trademarks? That would have been an entertaining lawsuit between Amazon and Microsoft though.
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It makes it a lot easier to search for on Google though...
Why? They could have simply named them with AWS Serverless, or AWS Compute, or whatever. Using these brand names might make it easier to evolve them later, or they really wanted nice sounding names because eventually you'd have to write out long phrases with the AWS prefix, and that's probably harder to market.
> 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…
Lightsail is not comparable to Heroku or App Engine. Its comparable to Linode or Digital Ocean. Its not a PaaS; its a simplified VPS provider.
Heroku and App Engine operate at the application layer, with limited direct access to the underlying operating system.
This is a 100 x better than their website. I've actively walked away from Amazon products because I could barely make out what it really was and if I could use it for the application at hand. Many thanks!
the names have a logic to them but I agree it’s intimidating to learn hundreds of things at the same time - so you don’t. you learn the bits and pieces you need.
for example:
EC2 actually comes from Elastic Cloud Compute. You have Compute in the Cloud which also happens to be elastic.
S3 is Simple Storage Service. It’s a Service for Storing things. It’s simple because it’s just a key-blob storage.
Route53 is obvious if you know what runs on port 53.
That's kinda useful I guess? But I still don't know whether I need EC2 or Elastic Beanstalk. And do I need still need Batch if I have one of the other two? Still, it's much clearer than Amazon's own pages about this.
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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 usually try to cut them some slack. I mean, they're operating this stuff at Internet scale and have never (AFAIK) raised prices. They've basically got two options: * Price things in an intricate way sufficiently specific to actual costs of providing the service for many use cases * Price things more generally in a way that more or less probably results in about the same revenue The problem with option #2 is that it…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It makes it a lot easier to search for on Google though...
Why? They could have simply named them with AWS Serverless, or AWS Compute, or whatever. Using these brand names might make it easier to evolve them later, or they really wanted nice sounding names because eventually you'd have to write out long phrases with the AWS prefix, and that's probably harder to market.
Which serverless? ECS Fargate? Lambda? Step Functions?
There are tons of AWS services which are technically "serverless". Even S3 obfuscates away the server.
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…
Like when you think about if a startup had to sell people on a single one of these services, they would have to actually say "like an unlimited FTP server BUT" and thats the only way they could get into board rooms and they would spend years on just that wrong and skeuomorphic branding just to get off the ground
Whereas Amazon doesn't have to do that, and doesn't have to explain the skeumorphic stuff to anyone, they'll just mention it in some conferences about what you can do now, the end.
Yeah, thats really cool. It doesn't mean there isn't a better way, but I can see how it isn't as arbitrary as I thought.