I still don’t get beanstalk? A drop in replacement for heroku?
Amazon Web Services In Plain English (2019)
41–50 of 93 posts
Re: Amazon Web Services In Plain English (2019)
#42This was scraped and reposted from the original at https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/
@dang Can you change the URL?
Re: Amazon Web Services In Plain English (2019)
#43The problem I have with these renamed is that by "simplifying" the name, they often cut out major pieces of functionality. The original names are at least "brandable" so that when I think of that name, I think of the entire suite of functionality. Some examples: 1. IAM -> Users, Keys and Certs. But other commenters have already pointed out this leaves out the whole roles, permissioning and policies that is really the…
I can certainly agree that some of those descriptions don't fully encompass what you're getting. Some of your points are more picking at the authors choice of simplifying language, rather than the effort to simplify the names themselves.
Some of the names are completely uninformative though -- cognito for example doesn't convey anything about oauth. Neptune doesn't make me think graph database. Kinesis doesn't make me think distributed log. Redshift doesn't make me think analytics database.
I think my personal issue with aws naming is that they've run out of three letter acronyms. So I have to remember is EKS the kubernetes service, or the hosted kafka service?
Re: Amazon Web Services In Plain English (2019)
#44VPC: 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
What is a virtualized private cloud?
Virtual wires, switches, routers, vpns.
Re: Amazon Web Services In Plain English (2019)
#45This feels like it was written by a late 90's sysadmin who just teleported to 2021 and has no idea how things operate today.
Sometimes I feel like that too, which is why I appriciate these kinds of articles.
I actually read the whole piece as a humorous way of giving you an overview of some of the key AW services. I had a pretty good laugh at least, and thought it did a good job of it. :)
Re: Amazon Web Services In Plain English (2019)
#46It's a bit early to mention this as its still in the works but we're trying to take the same premise of explaining complex things in "plain english" but specifically for AWS billing terms and concepts here:
Re: Amazon Web Services In Plain English (2019)
#47The problem I have with these renamed is that by "simplifying" the name, they often cut out major pieces of functionality. The original names are at least "brandable" so that when I think of that name, I think of the entire suite of functionality. Some examples: 1. IAM -> Users, Keys and Certs. But other commenters have already pointed out this leaves out the whole roles, permissioning and policies that is really the…
> Amazon Unlimited FTP Server would imply to me that S3 actually just follows the FTP protocol, which is totally false.
In fact, it's much closer to a WebDAV server!
Re: Amazon Web Services In Plain English (2019)
#48VPC: 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
What is a virtualized private cloud?
Logical isolation of resources instead of physical and virtualized compute, networking, and storage.
“Virtualized racks” doesn’t make a whole lot of sense since the metaphor is lost. You don’t think of power, top of rack space how many U’s some resource will take.
If you hate the word “cloud” then IaaS might make for a better name.
Re: Amazon Web Services In Plain English (2019)
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is a virtualized private cloud?
A colocated rack is a much more limited concept than a VPC. VPCs let your architect an entire network. You can have multiple private and public subnets, set security groups to filter traffic between them, do service discovery, use policy based access control, health check load balance, and host PaaS entities into the network (like Aurora serverless). On top of that, you can flex your compute. VPC is more like a rack…
The last bit doesn’t make a whole lot of sense because AWS is all hosted in racks. It’s just that people don’t typically set up virtualized networking that way.
We did and it was fantastic. All of our “environments” were overlay networks spanning our hypervisors and we provided “ops” services outside those networks just like AWS where they just got an interface in the environments.
I'm convinced that there is no other way to manage networks after this. The ops team has their own completely separate view of the infrastructure that can be managed, moved, and shifted around so long as you keep the fiction the same.
Re: Amazon Web Services In Plain English (2019)
#50The problem I have with these renamed is that by "simplifying" the name, they often cut out major pieces of functionality. The original names are at least "brandable" so that when I think of that name, I think of the entire suite of functionality. Some examples: 1. IAM -> Users, Keys and Certs. But other commenters have already pointed out this leaves out the whole roles, permissioning and policies that is really the…
I can certainly agree that some of those descriptions don't fully encompass what you're getting. Some of your points are more picking at the authors choice of simplifying language, rather than the effort to simplify the names themselves. Some of the names are completely uninformative though -- cognito for example doesn't convey anything about oauth. Neptune doesn't make me think graph database. Kinesis doesn't make m…
>Some of the names are completely uninformative though
Does Microsoft make you think computer OS? Does Apple make you think of computers and personal devices? Do common names Alexa/Siri mean anything specific to you?
None of the words used in those examples have anything to do with what they do, but they are now synonymous with everything you think of when those words are spoken/written. That's because the companies have spent time developing them as brands. AMZN through AWS has just come up with names so that they can be discussed more easily. They haven't really spent time with ad agencies running lifestyle campaigns for them.
I also think it falls into "I don't use something enough to fully remember what it does". However, is anyone reading this really not aware of what S3 does? EC2? Those are the basics where pretty much anyone starts with. Sure, not everyone will need EKS and it becomes more esoteric, but people that do it day-to-day know exactly what EKS is.