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Amazon Web Services In Plain English (2019)

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Re: Amazon Web Services In Plain English (2019)

#61

Post by derefr »

anonymoushn wrote: post #21
chrisan wrote: post #10

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

What is a virtualized private cloud?

A VLAN (Virtualized [private] LAN) is a LAN all to yourself, on top of a real shared multitenant LAN, through the magic of virtualization.

So a VPC (Virtualized Private Cloud) is "a cloud" (e.g. the whole of AWS), all to yourself, on top of a real shared multitenant Cloud, through the magic of virtualization.

In both cases, the traffic going over the LAN or Cloud is isolated from other tenants by the virtualization mechanism, so you don't need to encrypt said traffic the way you would in an untrusted "just leasing several random VMs in separate racks in a colo and having them communicate over the colo's shared LAN" environment (which is what AWS's pre-VPC "Classic" EC2 environment was.)

Re: Amazon Web Services In Plain English (2019)

#62

Post by grangerg »

I read the title and first expected some satire like this:

Imagine you're being taken on a "backstage tour" of the Internet. They open the door, turn on the lights, and as the distinct odor of decay and the chaotic scene of confusion and disarray greet you, you hear the guide blurt out, "Ah, crap! Who made this mess?! I swear it was presentable just a little bit ago! Well, good luck getting ME to clean this up! OK folks, we're outta here!"

And THAT is AWS in "plain English".

Re: Amazon Web Services In Plain English (2019)

#64

Post by codegeek »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #33

The 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…

Yea I agree mostly. They could have explained a bit differently. For example, it says that S3 Should have been called Amazon Unlimited FTP Server. That is definitely over simplifying it. S3 stores objects and a regular FTP server is just a server with files. I would explain S3 as "Kinda like an SFTP server but you get to add encryption, versioning, tagging, metadata to files when they get uploaded"

Re: Amazon Web Services In Plain English (2019)

#66

Post by Animats »

derefr wrote: post #61
anonymoushn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a virtualized private cloud?

A VLAN (Virtualized [private] LAN) is a LAN all to yourself, on top of a real shared multitenant LAN, through the magic of virtualization. So a VPC (Virtualized Private Cloud) is "a cloud" (e.g. the whole of AWS), all to yourself, on top of a real shared multitenant Cloud, through the magic of virtualization. In both cases, the traffic going over the LAN or Cloud is isolated from other tenants by the virtualization m…

Right. What really makes this work is that Amazon builds their own specialized routers.[1] They have a control plane hidden from their customers, one which lets them set customer-visible MAC and IP addresses more or less arbitrarily.

'All problems in computer science can be solved by another layer of indirection. But that usually will create another problem'. - David Wheeler.

[1] https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-web-services-secret-wea...

Re: Amazon Web Services In Plain English (2019)

#67

Post by paulddraper »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #33

The 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…

Moreover, even the paradigm of S3 is different then a filesystem. No directories, no file renames.

S3 is an object store. Give it a key and up to 5TB of data and it will store it.

(Yeah, you can translate one to the other, see AWS Transfer. But they are different.)

Re: Amazon Web Services In Plain English (2019)

#68

Post by chrisan »

tommek4077 wrote: post #22
chrisan wrote: post #10

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

And you seem to have no clue whats beneath your shiny, expensive cloud gui.

If you think a VPC is simply a co-located rack... well, sorry but it isn't.

Also, since every single AWS service requires a rack, I assume you also want to put Rack in every single name?

Re: Amazon Web Services In Plain English (2019)

#69

Post by Matthias247 »

jmcgough wrote: post #54
mrfusion wrote: post #41

I still don’t get beanstalk? A drop in replacement for heroku?

Heroku is a good comparison. Beanstalk is a way to specify the resources you need without needing to understand aws very well - AWS automagically provisions things for you and replaces instances when they become unhealthy. Compare to CloudFront, which as the declarative way to specify what you need but requires you to know AWS in depth.

I think you mean CloudFormation, not CloudFront?
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