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AWS services explained in one line each

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Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#301
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not openly joking, it's sales. If you feel like you're way overpaying for AWS, you're much likelier to look out for alternatives. So if they help their biggest accounts save some money, it'll net them way more in the long run.

If you are any decent size and you pay for a partner’s “Well Architect” overview, they will give you the money back in credits. I am not at liberty to say how much we spend, but it’s not over a million.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#302
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not openly joking, it's sales. If you feel like you're way overpaying for AWS, you're much likelier to look out for alternatives. So if they help their biggest accounts save some money, it'll net them way more in the long run.

Right - it gives the illusion that you're 'getting an amazing deal and wow these people are great' when it reality you're probably getting gouged without the consulting and have to opt in for fair prices.

Do you really think any company of any size doesn’t do a rational cost/benefit analysis when deciding when to build vs buy or when and what to outsource?

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#303
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If this team shows up, it means you're spending so much money stupidly that they are afraid a competitor will easily steal you away with an offering for 10% of the cost. Their job is to come in and get you scaled back so another sales team can't get a foot in the door.

If you have an MSP - and if you are a small company they can pay for themselves just by being able to get bulk discounts by coming under their organization - they will offer you one and you can get reimbursed via AWS credits.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dealing with Azure causes me physical pain. AWS you can poke around and figure it out, Azure is a Kafkaesque nightmare of infinitely confusing UI/UX, a permission system that is like trying to hit a moving target in a dark room, being moved by someone that hates you, doing anything seems needlessly complex, and trying to replicate/test anything locally is horrible (looking at you Azure functions).

Semi-shameless plug (I work for Oracle) but have you tried OCI? You might find both the console UI/UX and the cloud calculator pretty decent. That's just my personal feel, coming over to work as an Oracle cloud consultant with previous AWS/Azure experience. I'd argue it's normal those two are where they are; AWS is now a spaghetti of products, while Microsoft are anti-KISS by DNA.

Yes people who want to avoid lock in really want to get in bed with “call us for pricing” Oracle.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#305
post #278
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You bring up a good point - it would be a good idea for AWS to set some sensible max budget defaults for new accounts to prevent surprises. Since they don't, if you are literally so concerned with your current costs for this month, you can set a budget and alerts for whatever you want, so that you don't exceed some cost. Also, they show you your current cost for this month, up until the moment, as well as a daily bre…

I started using my new account yesterday. I already got a surprise, because in one place it says t2.micro and t3.micro instances are free for twelve months. But, if the instance runs Windows, or the zone is this or that, or something else I don't know, the only free tier instance is actually the t2.micro. And then there's the Unlimited option, and CPU credits, where if your CPU use goes over 25% for some time, it wil…

Or if that’s all you need you could run Lightsail for simple billing....

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#307
post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cognito is an identity service, “incognito” means unknown, “cognito” means known. Polly is a joke about how parrots talk, the service does text-to-speech. Athena is a goddess of wisdom, the service is for querying databases. The name is frequently some sort of silly inside joke. Except Fargate, that name means nothing...

I noticed you conveniently left out Redshift. :) What about Snowball, Chime, Sumarian, and Route 53?

Somebody else gave the Redshift explanation.

> Snowball

It's like Glacier, but it's smaller and moves more quickly. I think this is one of the dumb-codenames-turned-real that crop up from time to time. Fargate is another notable example.

> Chime

A chime is a notification. That's about all I got.

> Route 53

DNS runs on port 53, Route 66 is a famous highway.

> Sumarian

It's a really niche joke about the novel Snow Crash, that popularized the concept of digital "avatars".

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#308
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.

Yup; if you go with AWS, expect to build a pretty complicated setup distributed over many services. Even the basic LAMP / Wordpress stack mentioned in a sibling comment and often used in tutorials starts at $50 / month once you add everything up, and that's without any traffic. Although I guess Lightsail would be a lot more affordable.

$5 a month.

https://codethump.com/tutorials/aws-wordpress-cost-price-hos...

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 purch…

It does help, there are some early decisions that were made pretty well (the first or second time, at least). Oracle's EC2 is called "compute instances", S3 "object storage", SES "email delivery", Lambda "functions" etc. And object storage could have been Casper, load balancer Flamingo, or data transfer Rhino.

And then I’m stuck with the 4th (?) place cloud provider with a horrible reputation. Choosing Oracle definitely would violate the CYA rule - “No one ever got fired for choosing $what_everyone_else_chooses”. I would be safer choosing Azure or even GCP.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#310
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 "codenames" are easier to reference and discuss once you get immersed in the ecosystem. "lambda" vs. "serverless compute" - which one do you want to say 30 times a day?

Exactly,

How long has the idea of “ubiquitous language” when talking about a business domain been around?

Everyone technical at my company from the CTO down can have conversations and talk about CloudFront, API Gateway, Lambda, S3,SQS,SNS,DynamoDB, Aurora, Fargate, CodeBuild, CodePipeline, CloudFormation, IAM, WAF, EC2, ECS,ECR, Cognito, etc.

I’ve seen developers come in and within 3 months it’s second nature.

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