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Amazon Web Services in Plain English

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Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#231

Post by mehdim »

genericacct wrote: post #97
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #67

Hey HN, I wrote this, thanks for all the feedback. In particular if I've mischaracterized the functionality of a service or you see something that's really off please email me at mike@expeditedssl.com or just tell me here and I'll fix it.

Cognito is probably more like "oauth and backends for your apps"

Personally I find that Cognito is a great name, which represent well the big picture and challenge ls of identity issues.on the web.

Disclosure : I am Founder of oauth.io to what Cognito is compare.

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#232

Post by drfritznunkie »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #67

Hey HN, I wrote this, thanks for all the feedback. In particular if I've mischaracterized the functionality of a service or you see something that's really off please email me at mike@expeditedssl.com or just tell me here and I'll fix it.

Having just come off a stint with Azure, my experience with generic names (like many you suggested and like most Azure service name) is that they're huge negatives. It makes searching impossible even when you're using the service's documentation. Got a problem with Azure Web Apps? Good luck searching for it. What about Azure SQL Database? Or Azure Virtual Network? Azure Storage?

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#233

Post by txutxu »

jimbokun wrote: post #101
Pyxl101 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because when you figure out how to use them, you can save a tremendous amount of time and energy, and build sophisticated systems with simple code and little effort. When you have the need in a certain area, a lot of them will feel like "Wow, I didn't know that someone could automate this for me with so little effort compared to doing it myself". Most of it becomes increasingly valuable as you operate larger systems…

"When you have the need in a certain area..." I find this is the key to understanding a service, library or technology. It is very difficult for me to wrap me head around something if I haven't yet encountered the problem it solves. For example, I'm sure Docker is awesome, but I don't really understand it yet because I haven't yet felt the pain Docker takes away. So I enjoy following new technologies, but when I don'…

Did upvote your sincerity.

I've work with complex and critical linux firewalls, and I love some AWS networking aspects...

Your comment was like a fresh air of sincerity. We all need to deal with domain specific issues. You need to be practical to keep going on.

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#234

Post by txutxu »

joesmo wrote: post #131
PuffinBlue wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand where you are coming from. I'm just 'starting out' with a lot of this, despite a few years building/hosting websites, and these sort of services are the things I'm starting to look at. I'm completely disinterested in Amazon's offerings chiefly because they're so obtuse. Why should I expend so much cognitive load just figuring out what each service is and what it could do for me? It's undoubtedly possible…

You shouldn't. I've spent months trying to figure out a few services to launch some apps and it's been a complete and utter waste of time. Yes, there are a lot of services, but the platform is incredibly buggy, the docs beyond unusable and unsearchable, and the customer support extremely slow. Not only that, but you'll get stuck in a proprietary system that's going to charge you many times what more traditional hosti…

In comparison to... (?) can traditional hosting scale vertically AND horizontally (worldwide)? can it downscale when there is no load?

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#235

Post by code_sterling »

Goladus wrote: post #230
schrodinger wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. It gets the point across to me, and is presented in the right manner for me to not take it literally.

Not to me. The absurd lack of plausibility and simply erroneous analogy makes the whole rhetorical technique distracting and misleading rather than funny and insightful.

You must be fun at parties.

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#236

Post by senderista »

jmcomets wrote: post #109
edpichler wrote: post #102

Why do people like to describe services in a complex way? Maybe to seems a more complex product than it really is, or too look like "specialists" speaking about stuff. This is very common for small companies without marketing experience, but this happening in companies like Amazon and Microsoft (Azure), I can't understand.

A lot of companies have code names for their products, the obvious reason being easy/fast day-to-day communication. IMO this loses its effectiveness when you have a large panel of products, and each one is provided by at least one other company. TL;DR version: I use "Amazon's " instead of a code name.

AWS's internal code names are never used for the public services.
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