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Comment by Traster | Hacker News Reader

Some of these are clearly deliberate obfuscation. I need something to handle Queues, what should I use? Amazon SQS obviously. Oh cool, what’s that? It’s a Queue service! Oh great, why is called SQS? Simple Queue Service duh! Is there a more complex queuing service? No. There’s only SQS.

The acronym is totally useless, tells you nothing beyond it being for Queues and completely obfuscates what’s happening for anyone not in the eco system.

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I mean, what would you call it? It's basically a 'push/pop' interface with timeouts. Like, do you think 'Kafka' is more descriptive? Or Prometheus? Or any of the essentially randomly generated names that various projects and products choose?

By the standard of tech names SQS seems, relatively speaking, extremely descriptive.

Amazon Queue Service.

Or pubsub.

Having them start everything with “Amazon” would put them in the “kde” league of everything stupidly starting with k for no reason other than to start with k.

KuqueServive

yeah, but intentionally misspelling words to include a silent 'k' is a fun gimmicy thing. GNU does similar do they gnot?

So that would make it AQS or PSS.... Is that really easier to understand then SQS?

"pubsub" is the same number of syllables as "PS"

No, but they could just use "Queue Service" as the main branding.

I'm really failing to see how that's any clearer. If you're looking at SQS you probably already know it's an AWS service, and pubsub seems less descriptive than queue...

pubsub would also be misleading, given SQS does not support the pub/sub pattern. It's a queue where each message is processed once by a single consumer; it's not a pub/sub system where multiple consumers can subscribe to messages of interest.

Yeah, it's actually less correct, not less descriptive - I mispoke.

AWS offers a bunch of different queue-like services: SQS, Kinesis, MSK, Amazon MQ (supporting both ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ).

I don't think it's possible to build a queue-as-a-service that is any simpler than SQS, so there is literally no better name than SQS. (also, the suggested name "Amazon Queue" is pretty similar to the name "Amazon MQ" which does in fact exist)

It's a queue. It supports enqueue and dequeue. And that's pretty much it. It's a Simple Queue Service.

Purportedly Simple Queue Service?

I think SQS was the first AWS offering. In that context “simple” means simple compared to other offerings of the 2000s/rolling it out yourself. I agree it’s a little convoluted for newcomers in 2021 although probably unintentional.

It is neither 'clearly' nor 'deliberate' or 'obfuscation'. It is possible that you personally simply do not understand all the terms or definitions, that is a different story.

If you want to 'queue' things, there are many options, including a number of options hosted by AWS as-a-service. For quite a long time a 'queue' hasn't really been a 'queue'.

There is SQS, the simplest of them all. There is MSK, which is Apache Kafka, but managed, so you don't have to deal with it yourself. There is Kinesis Streams and Kinesis Firehose, which is like a many-to-one queue, there is a hosted ActiveMQ, which is more complicated than just a 'simple' queue, and then we have Redis which gets used as a queue by plenty of libraries, and there is a set of services that you can use to 'construct' queues, like EMR, Glue, Airflow, Data Pipeline etc. You can also construct a queue out of generic hosted services by combining S3, EventBridge, Step Functions and Lambdas.

So no, it is not totally useless as a name or as an acronym, and to add insult to injury: if you are not in the ecosystem you are probably not even close to the target audience. Just because you don't know something doesn't mean it therefore must be bad. You probably don't know what T&E is in the physical world, that doesn't mean it's a useless acronym or shorthand, it just means it's not for you. (It's Twin & Earth, used in a lot of domestic electrical installations)

Most of AWS isn't for random people off of the street to immediately jump in to. Neither is flying jumbojets, surgery, or recombinant DNA engineering.

> Is there a more complex queuing service? No. There’s only SQS.

Actually, there is, it's called AWS Kinesis.

> Is there a more complex queuing service? No. There’s only SQS.

Yes there is: https://aws.amazon.com/amazon-mq/

Hey, at least it has a Q in the initialism even though it's not in the first position.

That is why it should be called Qinesis, but this trademark was already taken!

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/qinesis/technology

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