Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

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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

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.

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.

Quite the contrary actually, it should have more humour.

Seconded :-D

Agreed. Humor should not obscure the meaning, but the idea that tech docs should be completely dry and never try even a little fun seems misguided to me. On the contrary, there are studies that suggest funny and a little weird things are remembered better than completely ordinary dry facts (in fact, there are mnemonic techniques based on that), so injecting a little fun may be very beneficial.

> This is old and I haven't added some of the new services that AWS has released since I first wrote it.

When did you first write it? I didn't notice a date on the page. That might be a useful addition to the page.

All pages should have dates on them.

I came across this a while back, and really enjoyed the way you laid your site out and explained the different services. I've been using AWS for many years, so was familiar with a lot of things already, but I did learn a few new things from you, which was great.

I hope you do spend more time to update this with the newer releases from Amazon. I find that in the console now, it has got to the stage that I cannot easily find the services I need in their drop down. (Yup, I know they recently redesigned the drop down to showcase thing a lot more clearly, but there is still SO much on there that I resort to the search function now, because I know the name of the service I am after, but it is actually quicker for me to type the name than to hunt for it in the list!).

Why not open source itand accept PRs. You still get control and people can help keep it up to date?

Opinion seems split pretty evenly between: "You should make it funnier" and "This is irresponsible and wrong because you don't explain XYZ nuance of each service"

I don't feel like litigating that through PRs.

Well you might not have to, people who dislike it can fork it

It would be funny to redo the icons also. I like how the shortcut bar gives you the option to use only the icons, as if anyone can remember more than zero of them.

I’ve been saying “files” up until now and it’s really “objects” that are stored in S3 ... list of unique names (that typically look like filename paths) and then there are the actual bits (which are the objects we call files)

not sure what the difference is. all local files on your HD also abide by these same rules. if you want to use any file you have to open it which ends up as a block of bits in memory

The important distinction is that there is no true file hierarchy and no tree traversal for object search. This has material impact on using s3 as a file system.

The almost immediate modal pop-up on those pages is pretty annoying. It's just as easy (if not easier) to close the page rather than the overlay.

The problem with these intrusive tactics is literally the next thread on HN right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13439828

Very sorry about that, something wasn't working right. I just removed it.

I agree, but on more fundamental level, the problem with these intrusive is that users are penalizing (mobile) websites with intrusive pop-up ads, usually by closing them, or sometimes, by adblock.

Great article! Could be worthwhile to provide a reference to the 'Cloud-Based Enterprise Pub-Sub Messaging' element of SNS? It does a bit more than just 'Send mobile notifications, emails and/or SMS messages' Current value: 'Should have been called Amazon Messenger' / Potential replacement: 'Should have been called Amazon Message Delivery Service' Current value: 'Use this to send mobile notifications, emails and/or SMS messages' / Potential replacement: 'Use this to send mobile notifications, emails and/or SMS messages or notifications to other web applications'

For what it's worth, the layout is somewhat broken for mobile browsers (tested with 360 px width): The table is too wide and bleeds out of the viewport, hiding parts of the text. Maybe you can make it horizontally scrollable or something.

To be honest a lot of those characters weren't really worth reading anyway, but I'll see what I can do.

Your humor from the website is bleeding to HN sire :-)

I like it :-)

I get a lot of flak for writing humorous things to keep one target audience interested in the topic at all, but getting picked up by a super serious target audience.

Basically the only I read this is because it was funny... I happened to accidentally learn a thing or 2 but that wasn't my intention. Please, humor it up!

I love this and the azure version. Refer to them from time to time. Thank you for taking to effort,don't worry about the detractors!

Not a bad stab at it, but SNS is not just for mobile notifications (and I hate that they always put it under "mobile"), and SQS is not "like" RabbitMQ. You need SNS -> SQS to get that analogy right. We have dozens of SNS topics and 3-4x that number of SQS queues subbed to them in order to replicate our old flaky RabbitMQ stack. We have never used them for "push notifications", and in fact when I've tried using SNS for that in the past, it did not scale very elegantly at all.

ElastiCache is not "AWS Memcache" (it supports other caching services), and S3 is not "unlimited FTP" (it does not support FTP protocols).

Amazon RDS is not Amazon SQL (that's what they should have called Aurora), but Amazon Hosted RDBMS.

I'd also argue that EC2 isn't always a virtual server (once you get to a certain size, you're on your own iron), and that SES can be used for more than transactional emails.

But, that aside, not a bad job.

I do think this is mainly aimed at developers used to more basic SaaS/PaaS services (like Heroku, which was mentioned a few times). Coming from that angle it really doesn't matter that S3 is not technically FTP, since it's more about "What do I use this for?". Using this list these users can quickly see that if they want to host files they should use S3 and not EC2.

You are right that this simplification is not technically correct anymore.

I really like it. A (stupid) suggestion for the AWS Scripts description ;-). It's like a Database trigger; but applied to events on the Amazon stack...

I link to your work in all my new hire kits.

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