
AWS services explained in one line each - jaytaph
https://adayinthelifeof.nl/2020/05/20/aws.html
======
elchief
I made this list for my buddy a while back. It's meant to be more humorous
than exactly correct

Route 53 - Holy shit! It's NSD

WAF - Holy shit! It's modsecurity

SES - Holy shit! It's Postfix

Inspector - Holy shit! It's OSSEC

GuardDuty - Holy shit! It's Snort

Data Pipeline - Holy shit! It's Cron and Bash

Athena - Holy shit! It's Prestodb

Glue - Holy shit! It's Hive Metastore and Spark

OpsWorks - Holy shit! It's Chef

VPC - Holy shit! It's a VLAN

Snowball - Holy shit! It's a truck full of hard drives

CloudWatch - Holy shit! It's syslogd

Neptune - Holy shit! It's Neo4j

ElastiCache - Holy shit! It's Redis

DynamoDB - Holy shit! It's MongoDB

S3 Glacier - Holy shit! It's DVD backup

EFS - Holy shit! It's NFS

Elastic Block Store - Holy shit! It's a SAN

Elastic Beanstalk - Holy shit! It's Apache Tomcat

EMR - Holy shit! It's Apache Hadoop

Elastic Cloud Compute - Holy shit! It's a virtual machine

Kinesis - Holy shit! It's Apache Kafka

QuickSight - Holy shit! It's Tableau

~~~
rlt
I'm not sure if the sarcastic tone is meant to imply AWS is just a rehash of
existing tools, but that's obviously not the case.

A list of actual competing software/products/services would be pretty useful.

~~~
scarface74
Especially since “EC2” is not just a VM. There are dozen services at least
that come under EC2.

Also if you start trying to use DynamoDB like you would Mongo, you’re going to
be really upset. The use cases, design considerations and performance
considerations of DynamoDB compared to Mongo is night and day.

~~~
takeda
Actually DynamoDB unlike MongoDB is truly a distributed store, and it actually
is closer to Cassandra, Riak (RIP), Aerospike maybe some others.

~~~
scarface74
Yes. But DynamoDB basically requires you to know your access patterns up front
and isn’t that flexible when it comes to querying - yes I’ve watched all of
the reInvent videos about how to properly model your DDB tables.

That being said, if I needed the flexibility and wanted to stay in the AWS
ecosystem, I would use DocumentDB with Mongo compatibility. It uses the same
storage engine as Aurora, it’s much more flexible and it doesn’t have any of
the well known downsides of Mongo.

------
davedx
Consider that your typical enterprise software project will use quite a lot of
these, and that you pay for them all separately, and sometimes pay twice for
them (e.g. S3 you pay for storage and for outbound bandwidth).

It's quite a tour de force how Amazon have taken "separation of concerns",
applied it to web services and used it to create complex and difficult to
understand or predict pricing to print money. Bravo.

~~~
exhaze
Have you ever used AWS? There's a whole suite of tools they provide around
pricing and budgeting.

> It's quite a tour de force how Amazon have taken "separation of concerns",
> applied it to web services and used it to create complex and difficult to
> understand or predict pricing to print money.

Is applying separation of concerns to web services really that bad? Look, if
you're a small company with a simple product, you can just put your stuff on a
few EC2 boxes and pay the monthly bill for that. At that size, your infra
costs are going to be dwarfed by your other costs of doing business anyway. If
you're a big business, you can literally pay people to keep track of this
stuff. You've got the extra money, because now you don't employ data center
architects, server engineers, etc. AWS is able to "print money" because it
brings a lot of value to many businesses.

~~~
mherrmann
> There's a whole suite of tools they provide around pricing and budgeting.

It could be there are such tools. But they are impossible to find, setup or
understand for someone who is not already an AWS expert. I recently got a $500
bill from AWS. It was impossible for me to find out which S3 buckets (or even
specific files) caused these costs. I looked at this for half an hour and have
used AWS before. They just don't tell you how to obtain this information. Or
maybe they do, and it is so well hidden that it might as well not exist. This
was a horrible user experience. As a customer, I want to know what I'm being
charged for. The fact that AWS make it so difficult make me never want to use
them again.

~~~
scarface74
You can get cost breakdown on a more granular level by taking advantage of
tagging. You can tag your resources logically and get a break down by tag.

The biggest mistake I see is that people jump into AWS whole hog without doing
the research or if they are large enough, hiring someone who knows what they
are doing.

[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/cost-
alloc-tags.html)

~~~
mherrmann
I don't understand why I even need to do manual things such as "tagging"
(besides learning what that even means in AWS) to find out something as simple
as why I'm being charged as much as I'm being charged. I'm sorry. It's
inexcusable.

~~~
scarface74
And large organizations would complain about why they couldn’t group their
resources like they want to. Having individual bucket costs would be of very
little use for cost allocation and to tie back to something like a department.
For instance, we tag every resource created with the same CloudFormation
template with the same tag. We can get billing based on an “application” and
all of its related resources.

Just like AWS is not understandable to someone new, I feel the modern front
end ecosystem is royal cluster but yet and still thousands of people
understand it after a 12 week boot camp.

~~~
mherrmann
You could have both. Let advanced users tag. But give less sophisticated users
insight into what they're being charged for - without having to go through a
12 week boot camp.

------
s_dev
Similar to [https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-
english/](https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/)

Why does AWS use such convoluted language? Is it because they're dominant and
it adds friction to moving to another provider?

~~~
ben509
I think it's because naming things is hard, that link proves it by coming up
with worse names for almost everything they tried to rename, and often far,
far worse.

Imagine the confusion if S3 were called "Amazon Unlimited FTP Server." That
gets every word wrong, except that "Amazon" is merely redundant. It's not
unlimited (having to pay for a thing is a limit), it's not using FTP, and it's
a service, not a server.

Or if VPC was "Amazon Virtual Colocated Rack". A "colocated rack" means your
computer in their datacenter. They actually have this service, it's called
Direct Connect, because you can actually

Lambda does require you've got some vague notion of what lambda notation is.
But "AWS App Scripts" suggests it's for mobile "apps", but it is not specific
to those. And it suggests it's only for scripts, but you can run an entire
application on Lambda just fine.

Or even DynamoDB. They recommend "Amazon NoSQL." They're not offering many
NoSQL databases, just their proprietary one: DynamoDB. They have a service
that offers many relational databases and that _is_ called Relational Database
Service.

~~~
Twirrim
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has been trying really hard to make sure things
are named in as straightforward a way as possible. It was a very early
decision pre-launch, and unsurprisingly not that hard to stick to. Marketing
people didn't argue, either, but maybe that's a difference between the
marketing team backgrounds? Enterprise company CIOs etc. don't want to have a
translation guide when it comes to making purchasing decisions.

Some of the "WTF, how did they come up with that name" with AWS comes entirely
down to the public name being the internal project name, e.g. Snowball.
Various engineers and managers have facepalmed hard when marketing decided to
go with the easiest option and use that name rather than come up with
something meaningful.

~~~
lucianf
It does help, there are some early decisions that were made pretty well (the
first or second time, at least).

Oracle's EC2 is called "compute instances", S3 "object storage", SES "email
delivery", Lambda "functions" etc.

And object storage could have been Casper, load balancer Flamingo, or data
transfer Rhino.

~~~
scarface74
And then I’m stuck with the 4th (?) place cloud provider with a horrible
reputation. Choosing Oracle definitely would violate the CYA rule - “No one
ever got fired for choosing $what_everyone_else_chooses”. I would be safer
choosing Azure or even GCP.

~~~
lucianf
Er, I'd argue that aiming for safety and/or following the crowd aren't really
the ingredients of a sound decision making process. On that basis no
challenger would ever stand a chance.

~~~
scarface74
That’s not my problem. Everyone looks out for their own self interest. Let’s
say that OCI and AWS both statistically had the same uptime. If AWS went down
for a day no one is going to question you as CTO for choosing AWS, besides
you’re in the same boat as everyone else. If Oracle Cloud went down, everyone
is going to be questioning your decision.

But, the saying initially was about IBM. The CTOs in the 60s and 70s who chose
IBM instead of one of their competitors in hindsight made a good decision. You
can still buy hardware from IBM today that can run COBOL programs written
thirty to forty years ago. All of IBMs competitors are long dead.

From a recruitment standpoint, you can easily find someone who knows or wants
to learn AWS or Azure - Oracle Cloud - not so much.

------
RedShift1
This is a 100 x better than their website. I've actively walked away from
Amazon products because I could barely make out what it really was and if I
could use it for the application at hand. Many thanks!

~~~
sixo
"Redshift: Warehousing. Store lots of data that can be processed through
streams."

Not sure what that second sentence means...

~~~
RedShift1
The counterpart to stream processing is batch processing. With batch
processing you run a job every hour or so and calculate a result, with stream
processing you immediately calculate the result you want as the data is coming
in.

------
013a
> Lightsail: Amazon’s hosting provider (vps, dns, storage)

Doesn't feel like accurate description for Lightsail, nor a useful one. Maybe
something like "simplified deployment and billing for some AWS resources,
including VPS, databases, DNS, and load balancers"

(listing "storage" as something Lightsail does is kind of weird; of course, it
does instance-attached block storage, you couldn't have a VPS without that.
critically, it has no S3-like blob storage product, and I think that's what
most people would associate the general word "storage" with, but maybe I'm
wrong about that).

~~~
flurdy
Sometimes I feel it is easier described by saying what its main competitor is.

Lightsail is basically AWS' version of Heroku and App Engine.

(i.e. a PAAS)

I wish Google would also do this. Many times on GCP's website or at Google
Next you try to decipher what the product is that they are talking about, then
you realise "ah, it is their version of S3, CloudFormation etc". If they just
had said that at the start...

Of course, no company will do this, unfortunately.

~~~
lost_name
Your statement made me wonder if someone else had done this, and sure enough I
found something --
[https://www.cloudcomparisontool.com/](https://www.cloudcomparisontool.com/)

Look for "Object Storange" for instance and in the row will be links to all
the competing services, so you could pretty easily do this to learn about
competitors through the one you know... At least for the big players.

~~~
itsmeamario
Isn't this wrong? At Google's Storage options, it says Google doesn't have
Backup or Disaster Recovery options.

As long as I know, aren't those types into Cloud Storage - nearline and
coldline object storage types?

------
vladoh
You are missing one of the really amazing services: Snowmobile
([https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/](https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/)). It
is a real truck, that connects to your data center, copies up to 100 PB of
data and drives back to one of the AWS data centers and dumps the data
there...

~~~
capableweb
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of hard-drives driving down
the highway" or however the saying goes. Latency is extremely long, but the
bandwidth is crazy once it's arrive!

Edit: Original quote (seems I accidentally modernized it a bit):

> Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling
> down the highway – Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981

------
robert_g
There's an open guide[1] that's pretty useful. Amazon also publishes (at least
some) documentation on Github[2].

[1] [https://github.com/open-guides/og-aws](https://github.com/open-guides/og-
aws)

[2] [https://github.com/awsdocs](https://github.com/awsdocs)

------
traeregan
Here's the Google Cloud equivalent: [https://github.com/gregsramblings/google-
cloud-4-words](https://github.com/gregsramblings/google-cloud-4-words)

~~~
itsmeamario
I came here with the hopes of finding something similar to GCP. Thank you!

------
superasn
This can be a good cheat-sheet and no wonder there have been so many attempts
at this(1).

Maybe we're better off making this as github page where users can send pull
requests and add/rewrite to these.

(1) [https://netrixllc.com/blog/aws-services-in-simple-
terms/](https://netrixllc.com/blog/aws-services-in-simple-terms/) (2)
[https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-
english/](https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/)

~~~
wegs
I'd prefer to see this integrated into the AWS UX.

For an external crowd-sourced version, I'd like to see something like this
with a column for maturity, and whether it actually works.

The classic AWS services are rock-solid, and perfectly sufficient to build a
business on. Many of the newer ones are.... much less so. A green checkmark,
yellow question mark, and red land mine icon would go a long way towards
letting me know what I should and shouldn't use.

~~~
imglorp
> integrated into the AWS UX

Sure, it should be right in the headline of the service's "about" page. The
fact that people need this at all is UX problem.

If people are reading your "about" page and nobody understands what the hell
your thing does, maybe your marketing, faux-tech, word salad is pointless.

~~~
Frost1x
>The fact that people need this at all is UX problem.

Is it a UX problem or is it intentional deep branding to further promote
vendor lock-in? This is one reason I've been opposed to AWS since the early
phases--I don't want to learn all of their stupid branded vendor-specific
nomenclature.

~~~
scarface74
If you are any sort of real business, you already “locked in” to more than
likely a dozen or more third party services. I worked at a company whose
entire workflow was tightly integrated into Workday via APIs, not to mention
SalesForce.

If you have ever worked in healthcare, the level of “lock-in” that they have
to their EHR/EMR and various other third party services. would make you cry.

------
StevePerkins
> _Lightsail - Amazon’s hosting provider (vps, dns, storage)_

> _Kinesis - Collect massive amount of data so you can do analytics (like
> ELK?)_

Based on some of these that I'm already familiar with, I don't think I would
rely on these descriptions for the ones I'm not already familiar with.

~~~
archielc
Couldn’t agree more.

------
lode
Some corrections: AWS Outposts: Run Amazon services in your own datacenter
(not on your own hardware)

Storage Gateway: Virtual appliance to couple on-premises applications to
storage in the cloud.

(So it's no iSCSI (block) to S3 (object) but Block(iSCSI to EBS), File
(SMB/NFS/S3 to S3), or Tape (iSCSI VTL))

Addition:

VMware Cloud on AWS: Bare-metal, automatically deployed VMware clusters on AWS
hardware.

~~~
jaytaph
thanks. Fixed the first one. About storage gateway: as far as I could see
(haven't tested it) you get a iscsi path which you can connect to from your
own device. It uses S3 as the backend store for files from and to this device.
Will try and take some more time to look into it (never used this myself)

------
fauria
Similar to "Amazon Web Services In Plain English":

[https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-
english](https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english)

Seen on HN (2015):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10202286](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10202286)

------
speedgoose
I see that AWS IoT Greengrass is missing.
[https://aws.amazon.com/greengrass/](https://aws.amazon.com/greengrass/)

I may be wrong but from what I understood, it's more or less a way to manage
AWS Lambda functions (cgi-bin scripts), Docker, and a MQTT client connected to
AWS on your GNU/Linux devices (raspbian on a raspberry pi for example, or a
x86 pc).

However you still need Ansible or similar to manage the device so the actual
value is kinda low because if you have a setup to manage the device, it's not
much more work to manage docker and a mqtt client yourself. About running AWS
Lambda functions on a the device, I think it makes sense for AWS to check the
box "IoT edge computing with AWS Lambda" but unless you have a huge codebase
in AWS lambda, it seems to be a bad idea.

In one sentence : "vendor locked half baked IoT platform".

~~~
jaytaph
The whole lot of IOT services are pretty confusing. Mostly because I have no
experience with IOT/MQTT in general and it took a few days to actually figure
out how to create and connect things (emulated). I actually bought some IOT
devices (lamps, sensors) to try it out, but this turned out to be vendor-
locked without any possibilities for MQTT. I reckon somebody with more
experience in the IOT field could provide more insight in these things.

~~~
jon-wood
I'll give it a go:

IoT Core: Managed MQTT broker, and state management for devices with
intermittent connectivity

FreeRTOS: RTOS operating system for microcontrollers to automatically connect
to IOT-Core or greengrass.

IoT 1-Click: Manage 1-click buttons that can be connected to other systems
like Lambda

IoT Analytics: Clean up and save messages from topics into a data-store for
analytics

IoT Device Defender: Automated detection of misbehaving devices

IoT Device Management: Firmware release management

IoT Events: Visually build automation rules based on device data

IoT Greengrass: Run Lambda functions on remote devices, and manage release of
new versions.

IoT SiteWise: Turnkey industrial automation platform

IoT Things Graph: Represent IoT devices in terms of connectivity - for example
a door sensors connects to a hub, which has an internet connection.

And one bonus definition:

AWS Sumerian - A 3D game engine integrated with AWS services.

~~~
wiremine
This is a great list. I'd add a few things:

IoT Greengrass - Edge computing that can run Lambda functions and ML models on
prem.

IoT Core - Managed MQTT broker, state management and rules engine for devices
with intermittent connectivity

I'm not sure I'd call SiteWise a "automation platform" I think it's more of a
data collection and visualization platform?

------
drcongo
It's sad that this is so necessary, but I'm still confused by the very first
two lines of this list.

> EC2 Virtual Private Servers > Lightsail Amazon’s hosting provider (vps, dns,
> storage)

Both of these are VPS? EC2 has no storage?

Absolutely not a criticism of your list, more a comment on how baffling AWS is
these days. I stopped using AWS once they hit the point where I couldn't
reasonably be expected to remember what all the three letter acronyms were. I
still occasionally have to use it for S3, Route53 and IAM - but every time I
log into the console I find that they've removed them from my "pinned"
services in the menu bar and I have to pin them again. Even this tiny detail
is enough to make me not want to have to deal with that * 1000 by taking up
more of the services.

~~~
callamdelaney
I think pinned items are on a browser basis - because I logged into another
account on the same browser and it had the same pins as my other account,
without me setting them.

~~~
drcongo
I only use Safari for any actual browsing, I've not noticed this happening,
just that whatever I pin is gone next time I log in. Maybe it's short lived
cookie.

------
v8engine
Reminded me of these similar threads I read a while earlier:

Azure:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20190321175020/https://www.exped...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190321175020/https://www.expeditedssl.com/azure-
in-plain-english)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13442597](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13442597)

AWS: [https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-
english/](https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10202286](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10202286)

~~~
philipodonnell
Any update to the Azure list anyone has seen? 2017 is a long time ago.

~~~
freeone3000
New Azure services tend to have names like "Cognitive Services Speech" or
"Cognitive Services Image Recognition" or "Azure Stateful Functions"...
There's not a lot to riff on.

------
joshfraser
Sometimes it pays to be boring. One of the hardest parts of using AWS is
learning all their silly names for everything. I know it's tempting to be cute
when naming things, but everyone else wishes you would just be clear and
descriptive. I've seen this play out at startups that love to name servers
after galaxies or cartoon characters. It's all fine until your new employee
onboarding guide comes with a massive memorization test before you can be
productive. Yes, db-master and db-slave are way more boring names than Saturn
and Uranus, but do everyone a favor and express your creativity somewhere
else.

~~~
latencyloser
I worked at a company that had names for all the conference and meeting rooms
based on various science fiction names and other "nerdy" stuff instead of some
sort of building-floor-room_number scheme. It was neat at first, but quickly
became agonizing trying to remember what _building_ a conference room was in
much less where in that building. It added an extra few minutes to every
meeting for me where I had to either look it up on the internal wiki or go ask
someone at the front desk where I was supposed to go or make sure at least one
person nearby attending the meeting already knew where we were going. It took
months to get the hang of for even the more routine rooms.

------
tilolebo
Very nice!

I was surprised by 2 descriptions:

Opsworks: I thought it was using Chef under the hood. Is it really Ansible?

CloudWatch: it's actually so much more than logging, as it also provides
timeseries, alerting and even scheduling. Not sure how to summarize this,
though.

~~~
wraithm112
Everything I've seen about OpsWorks is chef/puppet based. Ansible is not
mentioned in the opsworks documentation at all. I think that's just wrong.

------
tr33house
a bit tangential: I think a lot of AWS customers would actually benefit by
hosting on their own machines in a data-center. The tools (and hardware) out
there have become so good that there's minimal benefit to hosting on AWS for
more than 4x the price. A lot of DCs also accept shipments so that even makes
things easier. The trouble is that we've been conditioned, as an industry, not
to think for ourselves or dare question certain accepted norms/practices.
AWS/Azure/GCloud is great for some but I suspect it's for a much smaller
subset that we want to accept.

~~~
koheripbal
That's what we (mid/small-sized company) with couple dozen machines. It is
probably 10% the cost of AWS - but you do need to have at least one person
that can handle the servers when/if there are issues.

That one person only needs to devote maybe 2-5% of their time to it (once the
systems are setup), so it's still a net gain.

~~~
bcrosby95
Yeah, we use a mix of AWS and self hosted machines. We've had up to 40 servers
with this method and devoted similarly trivial amounts of time to it. If you
want it to be long term sustainable, you probably want at least 2 people that
can handle it, so they can go on vacation.

If your goal is to be the next billion dollar company, it probably doesn't
matter that much. But if you're self-funding and need a sustainable business
model from the beginning, there's a huge growth phase (mid-sized) where the
cost savings from doing this sort of thing can be large enough to be
worthwhile.

I'm not sure why so many developers seem afraid of hardware. Back in the early
2000s it definitely felt more commonplace for developers to be able to deal
with it. Maybe it's because we grew up having to deal with our own in the form
of desktops. Nowadays it seems like lots of people just use a macbook. And
that's their only exposure to hardware

~~~
scarface74
_If you want it to be long term sustainable, you probably want at least 2
people that can handle it, so they can go on vacation._

The fully allocated cost of two ops people in my neck of the woods is a little
over $300K. That can buy a lot from AWS.

 _I 'm not sure why so many developers seem afraid of hardware_

I want to _develop_. Yes I’ve been around long before AWS was a thing, I had
to manage servers, load balancers, and even an elevated “server” room with a
SAN with whopping 3TBs of storage back in the early 2000s. But in my old age,
my time is valuable. I’ve done the on call thing before where our database
server went down in the middle of the night when the night operations crew was
working.

I won’t work for a company that is not on a cloud provider and doesn’t have a
dedicated ops team.

But, if you are a small company. Why are you spending a lot on AWS? Two EC2
instances behind a load balancer and a hosted database shouldn’t cost you over
$500 a month and that includes a decent amount of traffic and miscellaneous
other charges. Heck if you are that small, just use Lightsail and when you
grow, peer your Lightsail VPC that you probably didn’t know existed to a real
VPC.

~~~
koheripbal
...but they aren't fully allocated. They're allocated at about 5% - maybe
less.

I manage a couple dozen servers and it's a small minority of my job.

~~~
sk5t
What are those two ops-focused folks doing with the other 95% of their time?
Are we talking about two developers who are willing to spend 5-10% time on
non-promotable server chores--while yet being on the hook in the event of a
hardware disaster--or people who consider operations their vocation and aren't
interested in software development?

I agree that it's possible to do that kind of work on a 5-10% basis, but it
requires just the right set of circumstances for sustainability. Like, maybe
it is your own startup or family business, or one is not particular good at
sysop'ing and wants to learn more.

~~~
scarface74
When I first started working at my current company, my manager wanted a highly
available SFTP solution that would automatically sync with S3. I designed a
relatively straightforward solution on paper involving a network load
balancer, autoscaling group [1] with two instances and a SMB share
([https://docs.aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/latest/userguide/...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/latest/userguide/CreatingAnSMBFileShare.html))
and gave him an estimated cost.

He said okay go for it.

But then I said, or we can just throw some money at AWS and use the more
expensive (on paper excluding babysitting time), AWS SFTP service. I gave him
both solutions as a test to see where his head was at.

He chose AWS SFTP. We are a small high margin B2B company and sign long term
contracts that are worth yearly in the six figures. We are very much focused
on outsourcing the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” so we can focus on
development and sales.

[1] Autoscaling would not have been used to scale on demand. We set a min/max
of two so if one server fails a health check, another instance will be brought
up.

------
jason0597
Sometimes I sit back and wonder if Amazon makes these names so complicated on
purpose. Hmm, now that I think about it more, maybe they had to come up with
these weird names so they could trademark them?

------
hagsh
Although AWS Braket is just in preview it's pretty safe to say it is a Quantum
Computer as a Service bundled with a framework to write you algorithm in (a la
IBM Q and qiskit). The nice thing about it is that you have a choice between
three hardware vendor, all featuring different architectures giving the
ability to test superconducting, ion trap and annealing systems from the same
place.

I have no affiliation with this other than being a Physics/CS graduate with
only one Quantum Computing course under my belt.

------
mabbo
> Kinesis Collect massive amount of data so you can do analytics (like ELK?)

I would say a better description is something like "pay per use Kafka".

------
syats
Is there something similar for Apache projects?

~~~
adwww
Ha good luck explaining in one sentance the difference between Flume, Spark,
Storm, NiFi, Camel, Apex, Flink, Beam.....

~~~
faizshah
I’ll try. Heres what u should know from these:

Fast, Reliable, Stream Processing - Flink

Data Science on Big Data - Spark

Reliable Distributed Log Aggregation - Flume

Low Code Data Flows w/ GUI - NiFi

Zapier for Enterprise Software - Camel

A Single API for Batch and Stream Jobs. Execute on Spark, Flink, managed
services etc. - Beam

Never heard of anyone use Apex over Flink. Storm community has branched off
into Flink, Spark Streaming, Heron and Cloud Dataflow.

Explaining Spark vs Flink is quite hard tho.

~~~
yazaddaruvala
From the little I know,

Spark was built as a Batch job solution. Flink was built as a Streaming
solution. Since Spark needed to adapt, they leveraged micro-batching to
operate as a streaming solution.

They are very similar today. _Maybe_ some remnants of the original design make
Spark "slightly less appropriate" for pure streaming usecases, or possibly
less able to iterate on future features/optimizations, but so-far that line of
reasoning has been only speculation.

~~~
faizshah
So Flink differentiates in stream processing in two major ways:

\- Flink guarantees exactly once stream processing through a barrier
checkpointing system.

\- Flink has very detailed APIs for handling state and doing stateful stream
processing.

Additionally, Flink has one of the most active communities in the Apache
Software Foundation: [https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-
softwar...](https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-software-
foundation-announces55)

In situations where you want to create a streaming application with persistent
state you might choose Flink over spark streaming.

------
k__
_" Large & scalable non-relational database (but not really a NoSQL system)"_

 _triggered_

~~~
zambal
Ha, that caught my eye too. I'd say DynamoDb is kind of the poster child of
the whole NoSQL thing.

~~~
jaytaph
Yes, you are right. I was thinking more about it not being a document-store
like Mongo or couchdb. But I agree it's NoSQL.. will update

------
ct520
Love it! Does anyone know if something similar for competitors? More
specifically azure?

~~~
hundchenkatze
I had this one bookmarked, I think it's originally from 2017.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20190508145128/https://www.exped...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190508145128/https://www.expeditedssl.com/azure-
in-plain-english)

~~~
ct520
Awesome!!!!!!! Thank you

------
unilynx
Cool list!

But I would just name "Lightsail" "Amazon's digital ocean"

------
jchw
Useful and interesting but some of them are either blank or, well:

> After reading it over and over again, i still have no idea what it does.

> Some quantum thing. It’s in preview so I have no idea what it is.

> in preview so no idea.

~~~
jaytaph
Yes.. some of them I have absolutely no clue on what it does. They might serve
some edgecase specific for that domain. There are a few services in preview
which I cannot see for myself what it does.

I will try to update and correct services as soon as I have more info (or
somebody can provide it to me)

~~~
marz157
Hey, dev here for Robomaker. Most relevant line from our overview page is
probably "AWS RoboMaker is the most complete cloud solution for robotic
developers to simulate, test and securely deploy robotic applications at
scale."

The main feature is the on-demand cloud hosted version of the robotics
simulator gazebo ( [http://gazebosim.org/](http://gazebosim.org/) ) that
allows you to run your robot's code in a 3d physics environment. You can then
take that tested/verified code and deploy it over the air via our fleet
management features to your actual robot.

~~~
jaytaph
THanks.. will update this

------
erwincaco
> Amazon Connect AWS version of ZenDesk

Wrong. That should be "Amazon's Cloud-based Contact Center"

> Pinpoint Create transactional emails based on templates.

Pinpoint can do SMS and voice too.

~~~
jaytaph
Isn't that what ZenDesk is too?

Yes, pinpoint can do more.. Will update

~~~
nostrebored
ZenDesk is a CRM/ticketing system. Amazon Connect integrates with ZenDesk CRM.

------
FigmentEngine
I built this
[https://moca.computingarchitectures.com/en/vendors/aws/](https://moca.computingarchitectures.com/en/vendors/aws/)

as well as visual representation
[https://moca.computingarchitectures.com/en/~hello-
world/](https://moca.computingarchitectures.com/en/~hello-world/)

------
harshaw
I'll bite. At the very least I would describe S3 as an object store (object
semantics) and EFS as POSIX file semantics with an NFS interface.

------
kevsim
This is really well done! I might tweak the Lambda one a little to mention
what they run in response to or to even drop in the serverless buzzword.

------
mekster
Is there a list of all the AWS services and what the counterpart it may be for
a self hosted open source solution?

Seems many of the actual services may have one.

------
rudolph9
It seems there is a a lot of back and forth on this thread about AWS good/bad.
On the one side, people seem offended people use AWS at all Which common it
serves a need and generally does what it’s supposed to. On the other side it’s
like Stockholm syndrome, do people seriously believe AWS is there for you and
hasn’t trapped you in dependency of their services?

------
sudhirj
Most sound about right except for Global Accelerator, which isn’t a way to run
your apps on edges, it’s a way to route all your network traffic through the
AWS edges. Make it a bit more reliable and faster, and has really cool load
balancing and routing options.

------
windex
Someone do this for Oracle and SAP's products list too please. It's a mess of
marketing speak and no one has a clue. With SAP you dont even get to see the
product in most cases. It's just marketing you have to make your buying
decision on.

------
mcv
That's kinda useful I guess? But I still don't know whether I need EC2 or
Elastic Beanstalk. And do I need still need Batch if I have one of the other
two? Still, it's much clearer than Amazon's own pages about this.

~~~
afterwalk
Agreed, a concise description of "why" and "when" would be more useful.

------
Jach
It'd be nice to include "year introduced" data as well. My AWS knowledge
peaked sometime in 2012 after DynamoDB came out. I know a bit about newer
things (like Lambda) but there's a lot of catching up to do...

------
tlobes
Tested Sumerian and it's a barebones 3D web tool (modeled after Unity but more
akin to ThreeJS editor) that can be controlled via script by other services.
One example is being able to do some tasks like in-browser AR.

------
danielovichdk
Soon we will all be back to hosting everything ourselves.

The complexity of pricing and so much different technology, which we
absolutely don't really need, will eventually lead to we start hosting things
ourselves.

Oh yeah, and privacy of course :)

------
celsocrivelaro
Thank you so much :-). I have no ideia about some services, even reading the
doc.

------
vivekf
The title should have been a computer science introduction to marketing terms

------
unixhero
Useful, but it contains factual errors: >S3 File storage. Not directly used
for mounting, but you can directly download files from HTTP.

You most certainly can mount S3 buckets, and its done frequently in data
pipelines throughout the industry[0].

>S3 Glacier Low cost storage system for backups and archives and such

Sure but it would be good to include why there is a tradeoff in price, why is
it low cost? For Glacier its intention is to provide storage, but rarely fetch
data, as it is very slow.

[0] [https://github.com/s3fs-fuse/s3fs-fuse](https://github.com/s3fs-
fuse/s3fs-fuse)

~~~
eterps
How is that a factual error? It didn't say that mounting was impossible, just
that it isn't directly used for mounting. How did you conclude that it's done
frequently throughout the industry? What percentage of S3 customers do you
think does this? If I would have to guess I'd say less than 1%. But I am happy
to learn I am wrong.

~~~
pfortuny
You are totally right, and your explanation is perfect. No need to bother.

You could also mount gmail accounts as a filesystem.

~~~
unixhero
I beg to differ.

I have already argumented against it, and provided evidence for my statement
[0].

My argument is logically airtight.

------
shermheadryder
> S3: File storage. Not directly used for mounting, but you can directly
> download files from HTTP.

S3 is an object store, not a file system.

------
ak39
Excellent! We need this for esoterically named Javascript frameworks too.

------
aptrishu
mediaconnect - to transport live video mediapackage - package live/on demand
video content mediastore - store video assets for live/on demand video content

------
callmekatootie
Does anybody know if we have something similar for Azure?

------
ibatindev
Really loved Amazon Braket's explanation

------
highprofittrade
Route 53 is too generalized

------
rijdz
somebody please make something like this for azure please

------
Ozzie_osman
Would be really awesome if each row also included the open source equivalents.

------
foobarbecue
Where's EBS?

~~~
jaytaph
EBS is actually part of the EC2 service. It's not listed explicitly in the
console service menu. So I did not add it. (same goes with loadbalancing,
security groups etc)

~~~
foobarbecue
Aha, I see.

------
urek_mazino
Nice

------
andarleen
basically, AWS is an ESB sold for parts. understanding this, is the first step
in building a competing service.

------
mraza007
This is useful.

------
minitoar
Ah I was hoping this was going to pithy/comedic.

------
pwdisswordfish2
All AWS services explained in one line:

Overpriced, unnecessary or both.

------
kumarvvr
Out of curiosity, as a solo developer, what would it take me to do on premisis
server at home?

I mean in terms of hardware and software stack.

------
calmchaos
AWS sounds like a good idea until you start calculating the cost of the setup
with any kind of clustering and moderate data traffic.

~~~
pg-gadfly
The compute is really a negligible part and one that you can severely effect.

Outbound bandwidth is the real killer, going at ~$90/TB

~~~
anonymou2
So you give them your data for free then you need to pay the ransom money to
get it back?

------
richrichardsson
> VPC Create your own VPCs within AWS

Not particularly helpful if you have no idea what a VPC is! Of course it takes
2 seconds to search this for yourself, but still.

~~~
wartijn_
Isn't VPC a wel known term? I guess the author just included that definition
to make the list complete.

~~~
jaytaph
I've updated it to "virtual private network" instead.

~~~
richrichardsson
I think just expanding it would be more helpful. I had seen the term before
and knew exactly what a Virtual Private Cloud was once being reminded what VPC
actually stood for.

------
nojito
How to waste money in just one line each...

Simplifying AWS like this only serves to normalize wasteful spending on the
"cloud".

This works when the economy is great....not so much when businesses are
looking to trim costs.

~~~
scarface74
Yes I’m sure you know every single vertical and business model well enough to
know whether it’s a “waste of money”.

------
panpanna
Well this was really useful.

I didn't knew cloudfront was an Amazon product. I wonder what cloudflare
people think of that.

~~~
detaro
> _I wonder what cloudflare people think of that._

Because of the name? Cloudfront is older then Cloudflare afaik.

~~~
panpanna
Didn't knew that.

Given the discussion few months back, I thought maybe this was one of those
lets-copy-our-costumers-business we-already-know-everthing-he-does things.

