
Amazon Web Services in Plain English (2015) - apsec112
https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english
======
michaelbuckbee
Hey, Author here. This is old and I haven't added some of the new services
that AWS has released since I first wrote it.

Whenever this list comes up there's generally a group of people that dislike
it for trying to be at least mildly humorous (The whole concept for it started
with my developer friends and I joking about some of the names and how opaque
they were, so not sure what I'm supposed to do).

There were a couple substantial edits I made to it where a few funny lines
were cut in favor of better explaining what/how something worked.

I also started fleshing out some of the services with slightly more in-depth
articles about them (such as this discussion of AWS Buckets where I compare
Amazon's CTO to a character from 28 Days Later -
[https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-s3-buckets-of-
objects](https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-s3-buckets-of-objects)

I've sometimes thought that I should try and make it into an ebook or
something, but there's always been something more interesting to work on.
Thanks to everyone who has enjoyed it, shared it with their friends and
hopefully took their first steps to messing around with AWS.

~~~
wyclif
Just a suggestion here from someone who has enjoyed this. I don't think you
should edit out the funny stuff. That gives it flavour. I think it can still
easily function as a serious reference while keeping the humour.

~~~
pier25
Quite the contrary actually, it should have more humour.

~~~
thecrazyone
Seconded :-D

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dcw303
This is really useful for a layman like me who doesn't have a lot of exposure
to AWS.

Anything similiar for Azure? I would really like to understand the difference
between the different types of app services, and especially how they relate to
the project templates in Visual Studio.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
[https://www.expeditedssl.com/azure-in-plain-
english](https://www.expeditedssl.com/azure-in-plain-english)

~~~
mrweasel
Sadly that one try to be a little too funny.

For example: Express Route - "Should have been called Pretty good" that not
really helpful. It should have been called "Azure MPLS" or "Azure direct
connect"

~~~
pxndx
I understood that as "that's already a pretty good name".

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beefsack
Calling S3 "FTP" is a bit misleading, I would have just called it "File
Storage" and explained it along the lines of FTP instead.

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
I agree. Alternatively they should have never used a silly acronym "S3" and
just stuck with the full name: "Simple Storage Service".

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
well there is a genuine need for a short url. But instead of aws.amazon.com/s3
I would say aws.amazon.com/storage would have been a good tradeoff, and
similarly for the other services just use the dictionary word of the service.
"AWS" already has "service" in the acronym, so no need to repeat "S" or
"service" for every sub-service of "Amazon Web Services".

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pyreal
I just discovered a bunch of interesting stuff that I had no idea AWS provided
thanks to the cryptic names. Most notable is Elastic Beanstalk - had no idea
that was a PaaS!

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velodrome
GCP does not really need one of these. It is a lot easier to understand. The
only time it gets confusing for people are the papers or projects they were
based on (e.g. StackDriver, BigTable, etc).

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dsmithatx
I would highly recommend this resource for further reading.

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

------
tharibo
Do we have the same for Microsoft products? Even as a developer, I can't
understand half of what they're proposing. Like what the hell is Sharepoint
anyway?

Or what is SAP?

~~~
nottorp
Microsoft has never been understandable. I tried to find an overview of dot
net on their site, when dot net was at 1.x and was going to cure world hunger,
but I wasn't able to understand what they meant by the '.net platform'. Gave
up after an hour.

~~~
nkassis
.net been many things over the years and included many things. I guess if
there was a definition at it's core (no pun intended) it's a managed code
runtime with an associated set of libraries and framework to develop
applications. But it's also a brand name for Microsoft development tools and
frameworks. But it's very much not precise in how it's used by MS itself.

------
ankurdhama
Does anyone know who are the bunch of geniuses that come up with the names and
decide upon what to use? World deserve to know about them.

~~~
sethammons
Developers generally have problems in two areas: naming things, regex, and off
by one errors.

~~~
ankurdhama
Don't think Amazon would allow developers to name products or is it that their
marketing team is just retired developers.

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noer
It's worth noting on the SES explanation it says:

>You could use it to send a newsletter if you wrote all the code, but that's
not a great idea.

You actually can use a self hosted solution like Sendy to send marketing
emails & newsletters via SES & only pay for the emails you send using SES

~~~
newsat13
I recommend mailtrain for sending news letters

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cygned
Still wondering why AWS does not provide a solid PaaS solution like Heroku
does (they are on AWS, though) - or am I just overlooking it? I would like to
host a few node.js/Clojure apps but I don't want to have the hassle with
virtual machines/IaaS.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
ElasticBeanstalk is their PAAS-like solution. I still tend to build out things
with Heroku as the central point and slot in AWS services as they make sense.

~~~
cygned
I looked at ElasticBeanstalk back then, and - frankly - to me it sounds like
an overcomplicated PaaS product. If I understood it correctly, they basically
"just" tie together a bunch of services for you. I was expecting something as
simple as Heroku, actually.

~~~
cyberferret
I would encourage you to take another look at it. You are right in that it
basically ties services together (mainly EC2 and RDS), but it does give you an
option of starting and deploying a Ruby or Node.js project from the command
line and taking care of all the details for you.

(In fact, you don't HAVE to tie services together that you don't need. If you
have a separate RDS instance already that you want to use, you can tell your
Elastic Beanstalk project to use that instead of creating a new one).

I use Elastic Beanstalk for all my projects now, and like how I can deploy
from Git repositories so easily with a single command. Granted the interface
isn't as easy as Heroku, but you have the bonus of added configurability in
your apps.

~~~
cygned
That sounds indeed better than I thought. I will definitely give it try.

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dangle
Thanks. <3 Can you also rewrite all tutorials please?

------
z3t4
NoSQL Parody: [https://youtu.be/fXc-QDJBXpw](https://youtu.be/fXc-QDJBXpw)

------
sukruh
It would be cool if someone did a similar thing for the Apache Big Data
projects.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
I was going to volunteer, but sheesh:
[https://projects.apache.org/projects.html](https://projects.apache.org/projects.html)

~~~
joe5150
The list of just "big data" projects is somewhat smaller

[https://projects.apache.org/projects.html?category#big-
data](https://projects.apache.org/projects.html?category#big-data)

------
roomey
Wonder what the vmware service on Amazon will be called - maybe Elastiware

------
frostymarvelous
This is very annoying to read on my S6 in chrome 55.0.2883.91

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a012
> Code Deploy > Should have been called: Not bad

The one service name that's self declared.

~~~
9point6
Judging by the Direct Connect one further down I think "Not Bad" was more of a
comment on the name rather than a suggestion for another.

------
chrisbolt
(2016)

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

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kasparsklavins
Broken on mobile.

~~~
dajohnson89
Looks good on my Nexus 5x -- I had to rotate the phone in landscape mode first
though :)

~~~
dustinmoris
Doesn't look good on my Google Pixel :/

------
dustinmoris
Someone needs to teach expeditedssl.com how to build a website in 2017 that
can also be consumed on mobile without content being cut out.

------
howfun
Machine Learning Should have been called Skynet

------
slightlyCyborg
Updoot, because I was thinking just the other day how absurd Amazon's naming
scheme is. Did an engineer think of that sh#!? If Amazon was run by Musk
instead of Besos, a harsh email would have been sent to the employees to cut
that sh#! out.

Source: Acronyms seriously suck
[https://twitter.com/davejohnson/status/602951117413216256](https://twitter.com/davejohnson/status/602951117413216256)

~~~
philtar
There's something particularly grating about your comment. From the 'updoot'
to the fetishization of Elon Musk.

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
Actually the poster makes a good point about how when organizations
excessively make acronyms, they can actually _hamper_ communication and
efficiency. I read the link, and I think Elon Musk makes some great points, so
I don't think the poster's praise of Elon Musk should be criticized as a
"fetisization", and I don't think the poster deserves so many down votes.

Although to be honest, I did have to look up "updoot" in the Urban Dictionary
:), so to be fair I should say unnecessary use of urban slang can also hamper
communication.

~~~
dajohnson89
The military uses acronyms heavily. The seem to be still in business.

