Amazon Web Services In Plain English (2019)

Some of these are clearly deliberate obfuscation. I need something to handle Queues, what should I use? Amazon SQS obviously. Oh cool, what’s that? It’s a Queue service! Oh great, why is called SQS? Simple Queue Service duh! Is there a more complex queuing service? No. There’s only SQS.

The acronym is totally useless, tells you nothing beyond it being for Queues and completely obfuscates what’s happening for anyone not in the eco system.

Re: Amazon Web Services In Plain English (2019)

#6

Post by staticassertion » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 11:55 AM UTC

Traster wrote: post #5

Some of these are clearly deliberate obfuscation. I need something to handle Queues, what should I use? Amazon SQS obviously. Oh cool, what’s that? It’s a Queue service! Oh great, why is called SQS? Simple Queue Service duh! Is there a more complex queuing service? No. There’s only SQS. The acronym is totally useless, tells you nothing beyond it being for Queues and completely obfuscates what’s happening for anyone n…

I mean, what would you call it? It's basically a 'push/pop' interface with timeouts. Like, do you think 'Kafka' is more descriptive? Or Prometheus? Or any of the essentially randomly generated names that various projects and products choose?

By the standard of tech names SQS seems, relatively speaking, extremely descriptive.

Re: Amazon Web Services In Plain English (2019)

#7

Post by staticassertion » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 11:59 AM UTC

What's in a name? Really, is "Amazon Virtual Servers" much better than "Elastic Compute" ? Maybe slightly. But at the end of the day you have to go look at it and see wtf that means no matter what, and the 'elastic' verbiage is fairly consistent across AWS products.

IAM is similarly not that bad - Identity Access Management pretty much tells me what it is.

When we have a field where things are named in extremely unclear ways - kubernetes, docker, kafka, prometheus, etc etc etc - these really don't seem that bad by comparison.

Re: Amazon Web Services In Plain English (2019)

#8

Post by adambatkin » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 12:11 PM UTC

IAM "Should have been called Users, Keys and Certs"

That's funny. Because we have hundreds of developers using AWS every day, using IAM all the time, and never using a single IAM User.

IAM is actually named extremely well. identity and Access Management. I can't think of a better name. And if your problem is that you just don't like acronyms, you probably picked the wrong industry.

Re: Amazon Web Services In Plain English (2019)

#9

Post by cntrmmbrpsswrd » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 12:14 PM UTC

staticassertion wrote: post #7

What's in a name? Really, is "Amazon Virtual Servers" much better than "Elastic Compute" ? Maybe slightly. But at the end of the day you have to go look at it and see wtf that means no matter what, and the 'elastic' verbiage is fairly consistent across AWS products. IAM is similarly not that bad - Identity Access Management pretty much tells me what it is. When we have a field where things are named in extremely uncl…

I think everything you said just pointed out how bad it really is in the field. You either have an acronym, which people assume you know, or nonsense words.

Boring descriptive names are better, but don't look as good when marketing the product (I'd assume).

Re: Amazon Web Services In Plain English (2019)

#10

Post by chrisan » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 12:20 PM UTC

VPC: Amazon Virtual Colocated Rack

What in the world? Why would I want a rack in the world of a cloud.

I want a virtualized private cloud, which not so oddly is named Virtual Private Cloud.

I feel like the person who wrote this got into web dev back when I started in the 90s, then never left the time frame. This dude, much like this webpage, clearly have not kept up with the times