[HN Gopher] Amazon Web Services In Plain English (2019)
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Amazon Web Services In Plain English (2019)
Author : mbildner
Score : 245 points
Date : 2021-07-25 10:48 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.web3us.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.web3us.com)
| notwedtm wrote:
| This feels like it was written by a late 90's sysadmin who just
| teleported to 2021 and has no idea how things operate today.
| daptaq wrote:
| Sometimes I feel like that too, which is why I appriciate these
| kinds of articles.
| sundvor wrote:
| 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. :)
| jleader wrote:
| Exactly. When I read "Amazon Unlimited FTP Server" i heard a
| modem handshake sound in my head.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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 core of IAM.
|
| 2. S3 -> Amazon Unlimited FTP Server would imply to me that S3
| actually just follows the FTP protocol, which is totally false.
|
| 3. Lambda -> AWS App Scripts. I have news for the author, but I
| know some companies and architectures that use Lambda as a basis
| for an entire serverless infrastructure, a heck of a lot more
| than "little scripts", e.g. serving whole websites.
|
| 4. Cognito -> Amazon OAuth as a Service - except many companies
| use it to store plain user accounts (e.g. username and password),
| not just setting up OAuth for accounts managed elsewhere.
|
| 5. SNS -> Amazon Messenger. But SNS can be used for a lot more
| than just sending emails, texts or push notifications. For
| example, it can be used to trigger lambdas. "Notification
| Service" seems to much better encompass the generic nature of the
| notification handling that SNS provides.
| codegeek wrote:
| 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"
| chrsig wrote:
| 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?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Some of the names are completely uninformative though --
| cognito for example doesn't convey anything about oauth.
|
| That's kind of the point, though. A "brandable" name is
| something that generally evokes what the service does, but is
| not so limited that it only specifies the exact features at
| the time of initial release.
|
| I mean, by the author's logic, Amazon itself should have been
| called Internet Book Store. Which name do you think would
| have been more successful?
| dylan604 wrote:
| >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.
| chrsig wrote:
| I get the point, that with sufficient branding to a target
| audience, the issue is negated, but I think you're
| conflating branding for a corporation with branding for
| niche products. The level of effort put into branding the
| corporation at large versus the level of branding for any
| individual service is orders of magnitude apart.
|
| Importantly, with AWS, there's dozens of services, all
| competing for a three letter address space. It's getting
| saturated, so it's easier and easier to get confused.
|
| > Sure, not everyone will need EKS and it becomes more
| esoteric, but people that do it day-to-day know exactly
| what EKS is.
|
| This is sort of my point. I work with kubernetes and kafka.
| The kafka instance that I connect to is managed, the k8s
| cluster I deploy to is not. I can't tell you off the top of
| my head if EKS is managed k8s or managed kafka. That was
| the breaking point for me to stop putting effort into
| trying to remember.
|
| I have pretty severe ADHD, so I can accept that I'm
| probably outside a standard deviation as far as ability to
| remember three letter acronyms, but I think I still stand
| as a contradiction to your assertion.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| Huh? Microsoft is almost literally microprocessor software.
| Sounds pretty descriptive to me.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I had intended to add Windows to that, but my brain-to-
| typing-fingers skipped over it. The word "Windows" tells
| me nothing about what it does in the "same contenxt" as
| what's being discussed here. We've just had that crap
| shoved down our gullets for all this time it has become
| synonymous with software operating system not because the
| word is descriptive of purpose.
| syshum wrote:
| >Does Microsoft make you think computer OS?
|
| No, because it is Company not an OS. And today I bet more
| people associate Microsoft with Xbox, or Office then with
| Windows. Windows has been Microsoft's least profitable
| division for awhile now. The OS is their loss leader
|
| > Does Apple make you think of computers and personal
| devices?
|
| No, Apple makes me think of Cringe Hippies over spending on
| an poorly engineered fashion statement... ;) Or prime
| example of a company claiming to be environmentally
| friendly while actively designing their products to have to
| be thrown away instead of repaired...
|
| >AMZN through AWS has just come up with names so that they
| can be discussed more easily.
|
| I dont think that is true at all, even in tech circles
| trying to remember what the different service names are is
| pain.
|
| Amazon AWS took a look at Microsoft, the worse company in
| the world at naming things, and said "Hold my beer"
|
| >>However, is anyone reading this really not aware of what
| S3 does? EC2?
|
| S3, probably not but it is also the oldest product and has
| become Standard Standard Cloud based Object Storage, S3
| while an AWS service is also a protocol adopted by
| countless other services, and open source projects.
|
| EC2, Yes I better there are those that do not know what EC2
| is, or that to use EC2 you need EBS. And the deeper you go
| the more complex the web of services become.
| derefr wrote:
| > 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!
| paulddraper wrote:
| 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.)
| adambatkin wrote:
| 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.
| jlg23 wrote:
| > And if your problem is that you just don't like acronyms, you
| probably picked the wrong industry.
|
| Once upon a time, I worked for a company that bought a lot of
| IBM's 8656-1RY, which was later renamed to "x-series
| $whatever", according to some obscure scheme made up by
| marketing. Fortunately, the Japanese site was not yet updated,
| so I could get firmware updates through them. Some weeks later,
| an IBM representative showed up, he did not even try to sell us
| anything after complimenting us on finishing some setup work
| for 10% of the effort he would have billed us. "Any questions?"
| "Yes, what's with the naming scheme?" He smiled, pulled out a
| mouse-pad "the evolution of the x-series". "Yes, marketing-BS,
| but that's the only documentation on the renaming we've got".
|
| Summa summarum: Criticizing some intrinsics does not
| automatically put you in "the wrong industry", maybe you just
| have seen enough to call BS BS when you see it.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Agreed. "Users, Keys and Certs" neglects the whole roles /
| permissions aspects of IAM, which in my experience is by far
| the larger part of IAM.
|
| The users & keys part is actually just a tiny part of it.
| dylan604 wrote:
| It just shows that someone is writing something from their
| personal perspective and thinks the rest of the world should
| conform to their view points. Also, it really sounds like a
| recent cloud "convert" trying to make hay as a thought leader
| (which is a phrase that makes me want to hurl), all the while
| revealing their ignorance as not fully understand the topic
| at hand. In other words, typical blogosphere crap (even
| though this isn't really a blog, just a syndrome).
| eplanit wrote:
| IAM has been in use, without any confusion that I've
| encountered amongst various clients, for well over 10 years.
| How is it confusing? It sounds like people are wanting dumbed-
| down "Romper Room" names. Meaningful acronyms serve as
| mnemonics as to what the thing is. Noobs should learn and
| embrace.
| pfarrell wrote:
| I just realized. Is it a play on the phrase "I am"? If that's
| obvious, it just clicked with me after using AWS for ten years.
| georgyo wrote:
| Identity and Access Management existed as a term long before
| AWS. They called the feature the same name as what people
| called what that feature does.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >And if your problem is that you just don't like acronyms, you
| probably picked the wrong industry.
|
| Maybe they should try the military? I hear they only use
| acronyms occasionally!
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| This was scraped and reposted from the original at
| https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/
| nacs wrote:
| @dang Can you change the URL?
| jaredsohn wrote:
| Fortunately, the AWS UI usually allows you to search for these
| services using text from what this says things 'should have been
| called'.
| Animats wrote:
| That's useful, since Amazon itself doesn't seem to offer a one-
| page table of their offerings.
| skottk wrote:
| The comparison of AWS WAF to Sophos could not be more misleading.
| It's an engine for building a limited set of HTTP exploit
| detections, and has nothing to do with endpoint protection
| whatsoever.
| naveen99 wrote:
| Does aws have anything analogous to Microsoft's azure free tier
| where you have some free quota monthly ?
|
| https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/free-account-faq/
| lentil wrote:
| Yep: https://aws.amazon.com/free
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I'd like someone to do one of these for Policies. Every time I
| need to tweak an IAM or an S3 or a permission, I have to write a
| policy. I never quite know what I'm doing, but I get it to work.
| I'd really like a hand-held walkthrough of why policies are
| written that way, and how to write one without accidentally
| footbulleting myself.
| chrisan wrote:
| 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
| anonymoushn wrote:
| What is a virtualized private cloud?
| derefr wrote:
| 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.)
| Animats wrote:
| 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...
| Spivak wrote:
| 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.
| kubanczyk wrote:
| Virtual wires, switches, routers, vpns.
| lukevp wrote:
| 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 with a firewall, an f5, a smart switch with vlans,
| something like kubernetes to automatically scale compute...
| but there are things that aren't even possible in a rack
| because you can transparently both manage your own compute
| with ec2 and add PaaS managed offerings like RDS,
| elasticsearch, kafka, etc. all to the same network.
| Spivak wrote:
| 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.
| tommek4077 wrote:
| And you seem to have no clue whats beneath your shiny,
| expensive cloud gui.
| chrisan wrote:
| 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?
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| Maybe you're not the intended audience. It can get exhausting
| to keep up with the (new) times and learn a new stack again.
|
| I'm on my fourth or fifth time and it's starting to get
| wearying. I'm glad I'm not building simple PHP apps on MySQL
| anymore, but a new AWS whatchamacallit gets little more than a
| groan from me.
| miga wrote:
| This one page is like a half of the AWS certification.
|
| The other half is best learned by porting services from
| competitors to AWS and back again.
|
| Can you please add Azure and GCP service names too?
| stone-tech wrote:
| This is great ! Thanks
| fouc wrote:
| S3 "Should have been called Amazon Unlimited FTP Server"
| najmlion wrote:
| Yeah that's what it says...
| 123pie123 wrote:
| not as complete, but see also
| https://gist.github.com/miglen/f6eef81803a43dad434d
|
| for AWS and GCP side by side in plain english
| nokya wrote:
| Thanks for the share. I actually find your link more useful
| than what the OP offers.
|
| If anyone finds the same with azure also, I'm interested.
| v8engine wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20190321175020/https://www.exped.
| ..
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13442597
| collsni wrote:
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/aws-prof...
|
| Azure to AWS
| user3939382 wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27948093
| mrfusion wrote:
| I still don't get beanstalk? A drop in replacement for heroku?
| jmcgough wrote:
| 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.
| Matthias247 wrote:
| I think you mean CloudFormation, not CloudFront?
| Traster wrote:
| 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.
| dexterdog wrote:
| Hey, at least it has a Q in the initialism even though it's not
| in the first position.
| miga wrote:
| That is why it should be called Qinesis, but this trademark
| was already taken!
|
| https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/qinesis/technology
| adambatkin wrote:
| AWS offers a bunch of different queue-like services: SQS,
| Kinesis, MSK, Amazon MQ (supporting both ActiveMQ and
| RabbitMQ).
|
| I don't think it's possible to build a queue-as-a-service that
| is any simpler than SQS, so there is literally no better name
| than SQS. (also, the suggested name "Amazon Queue" is pretty
| similar to the name "Amazon MQ" which does in fact exist)
|
| It's a queue. It supports enqueue and dequeue. And that's
| pretty much it. It's a Simple Queue Service.
| miga wrote:
| Purportedly Simple Queue Service?
| oneplane wrote:
| It is neither 'clearly' nor 'deliberate' or 'obfuscation'. It
| is possible that you personally simply do not understand all
| the terms or definitions, that is a different story.
|
| If you want to 'queue' things, there are many options,
| including a number of options hosted by AWS as-a-service. For
| quite a long time a 'queue' hasn't really been a 'queue'.
|
| There is SQS, the simplest of them all. There is MSK, which is
| Apache Kafka, but managed, so you don't have to deal with it
| yourself. There is Kinesis Streams and Kinesis Firehose, which
| is like a many-to-one queue, there is a hosted ActiveMQ, which
| is more complicated than just a 'simple' queue, and then we
| have Redis which gets used as a queue by plenty of libraries,
| and there is a set of services that you can use to 'construct'
| queues, like EMR, Glue, Airflow, Data Pipeline etc. You can
| also construct a queue out of generic hosted services by
| combining S3, EventBridge, Step Functions and Lambdas.
|
| So no, it is not totally useless as a name or as an acronym,
| and to add insult to injury: if you are not in the ecosystem
| you are probably not even close to the target audience. Just
| because you don't know something doesn't mean it therefore must
| be bad. You probably don't know what T&E is in the physical
| world, that doesn't mean it's a useless acronym or shorthand,
| it just means it's not for you. (It's Twin & Earth, used in a
| lot of domestic electrical installations)
|
| Most of AWS isn't for random people off of the street to
| immediately jump in to. Neither is flying jumbojets, surgery,
| or recombinant DNA engineering.
| CapriciousCptl wrote:
| I think SQS was the first AWS offering. In that context
| "simple" means simple compared to other offerings of the
| 2000s/rolling it out yourself. I agree it's a little convoluted
| for newcomers in 2021 although probably unintentional.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Is there a more complex queuing service? No. There's only
| SQS.
|
| Actually, there is, it's called AWS Kinesis.
| staticassertion wrote:
| 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.
| dijit wrote:
| Amazon Queue Service.
|
| Or pubsub.
| flatiron wrote:
| Having them start everything with "Amazon" would put them
| in the "kde" league of everything stupidly starting with k
| for no reason other than to start with k.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| KuqueServive
| dylan604 wrote:
| yeah, but intentionally misspelling words to include a
| silent 'k' is a fun gimmicy thing. GNU does similar do
| they gnot?
| staticassertion wrote:
| I'm really failing to see how that's any clearer. If you're
| looking at SQS you probably already know it's an AWS
| service, and pubsub seems less descriptive than queue...
| lentil wrote:
| pubsub would also be misleading, given SQS does not
| support the pub/sub pattern. It's a queue where each
| message is processed once by a single consumer; it's not
| a pub/sub system where multiple consumers can subscribe
| to messages of interest.
| staticassertion wrote:
| Yeah, it's actually less correct, not less descriptive -
| I mispoke.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| So that would make it AQS or PSS.... Is that really easier
| to understand then SQS?
| dijit wrote:
| "pubsub" is the same number of syllables as "PS"
| Kwpolska wrote:
| No, but they could just use "Queue Service" as the main
| branding.
| StratusBen wrote:
| It'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:
|
| https://handbook.vantage.sh/
| staticassertion wrote:
| 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.
| fnord77 wrote:
| maybe it's an issue with my neurology, but for me if the name
| isn't descriptive it takes me longer to make association
| between the name and what it actually is.
|
| with "Virtual Servers", I would have only had to look it up
| once. With "Elastic Computer" it took me months of rereading
| what that service was for it to sink in.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| That's fascinating and shows how different people are. I'm
| completely opposite! If you name something "gnorf" or
| "harjblang" and give me a definition, it occupies a specific
| unique place in my mind and I can learn memorize use and
| associate it.
|
| With generic terms using generic words making up significant
| phrases, my mind struggles mightily, whether that's virtual
| private servers or integrated change control or steering rack
| control arm... This incidentally is why I struggle to learn
| any e.g. Car mechanics in English because it's all regular
| words strung up together Instead of bespoke unique keywords
| cntrmmbrpsswrd wrote:
| 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).
| detaro wrote:
| What's a boring descriptive name that people wouldn't want to
| turn into an acronym for "Identity and Access Management"?
| ljm wrote:
| They're products, sometimes even brands, so I'm not sure why
| this requirement for clarity is needed. It at least helps
| differentiate projects in the same space.
|
| If I want something to provision infra I could go for Chef,
| Puppey, Ansible, Terraform. Or is it better for me to write my
| Infrastructure as Code setup using Whitespace Significant
| Serialization Format?
| grangerg wrote:
| 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".
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(page generated 2021-07-25 23:01 UTC)