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Comment by dodobirdlord | Hacker News Reader

The approach of branding things as Google Cloud XYZ makes for really homogeneous acronyms. It solves the problem that AWS has with terrible names (what the hell is a “Redshift”?) by giving everything a boring name, but in exchange you get GCS being the acronym for Google Cloud Storage, Google Cloud Spanner, Google Cloud Search, Google Cloud SQL...

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> The name means to shift away from Oracle, red being an allusion to Oracle, whose corporate color is red and is informally referred to as "Big Red.

I learned this recently and thought I'd share! From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Redshift

I actually don't mind the acronymed stuff so much. My primary complaint is that the names are so generic that you can't differentiate the products by name except by memorizing them. For example:

* BigQuery vs BigTable (though, there are at least some hints in these)

* Cloud Storage vs Filestore vs Datastore vs Firestore (vs Firebase? How are these related?)

I can of course make an effort to keep these straight, but then having to clarify in every design convo because my manager can't, or having a hard time googling (lol) things germane to the product I'm on, etc, is just a huge hassle.

Agree about firestore vs filestore but if a manager doesn’t know what bigtable is I’d probably consider leaving

Clearly we should start using emoji triplets for service names... easy to read/remember, and easy to type out on modern systems

Spanner is also a bad name for a database. They should've called it Bigertable.

A. It’s not even correct b. It’s a terrible name bc it will get confused in code/configs all the time

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