Comment by ben509 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ben509 | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Huh, I can actually appreciate that more now.

Like when you think about if a startup had to sell people on a single one of these services, they would have to actually say "like an unlimited FTP server BUT" and thats the only way they could get into board rooms and they would spend years on just that wrong and skeuomorphic branding just to get off the ground

Whereas Amazon doesn't have to do that, and doesn't have to explain the skeumorphic stuff to anyone, they'll just mention it in some conferences about what you can do now, the end.

Yeah, thats really cool. It doesn't mean there isn't a better way, but I can see how it isn't as arbitrary as I thought.

Services like S3 are referred to as „object storage“. AWS Lambda is a service for „serverless compute“ or „function as a service“ (although it‘s debatable if these are good names for the concept).

My point is that definitely are named for these concepts but AWS uses brand names which is quite confusing for people who are new to AWS.

It makes it a lot easier to search for on Google though...

Why? They could have simply named them with AWS Serverless, or AWS Compute, or whatever.

Using these brand names might make it easier to evolve them later, or they really wanted nice sounding names because eventually you'd have to write out long phrases with the AWS prefix, and that's probably harder to market.

> AWS Serverless

Which serverless? ECS Fargate? Lambda? Step Functions?

There are tons of AWS services which are technically "serverless". Even S3 obfuscates away the server.

https://aws.amazon.com/serverless/

Los Balancer = HaProxy Serverless

Those names are extremely generic and each covers many completely different service offerings.

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