AWS S3? Cloudflare R2? We think we know what's coming next | Hacker News Reader

AWS S3? Cloudflare R2? We think we know what's coming next

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420 pointscloudfalcon147 comments

Things get really confusing when you also use SAP R/3, migrating it to S/4: "So the S/4 gets some of its data from R/3 via S3 and writes reports to R2 which are used for a consolidated view in R/3 as long as the analysis isn't migrated to S/4 which will get all data via S3."

"Excuse me, sir. Seeing as how the V.P. is such a V.I.P., shouldn't we keep the P.C. on the Q.T.? 'Cause if it leaks to the V.C. he could end up M.I.A., and then we'd all be put out in K.P."

R.I.P.

W.T.F. ...

What the fuck does WTF means?

U.S.A. The land of acronyms...

Trust me, it's not only the U.S.

Source: I'm from Germany

y'all have nothing on USSR and Russia.

There's even a small Twitter trend of posting "when you need English to navigate in Moscow". Se. e.g. https://demotos.ru/sites/default/files/caricatures/2019-10-3...

Ха! With this exception, Russian metros actually have some of the best signage I've seen anywhere, even that Cyrillic is easy to follow.

Initialisms.

Initialisms are a subset of acronyms; acronym is accurate here.

> Initialisms are a subset of acronyms; acronym is accurate here.

I believe you have that inverted.

An abbreviation is a shortened version of a word or phrase, and encompasses both initialisms and acronyms. An initialism is pronounced one letter at a time.

Acronyms are a separate special case - an abbreviation that is pronounceable as a word unto itself.

> The broader sense of acronym inclusive of terms pronounced as the individual letters (such as "TNT") is sometimes criticized, but it is the term's original meaning[1] and is in common use.[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym

The DOA would like a word..

(for the record that was the Department of Acronyms).

One reason the there are no good TTS programs for Hebrew is the overwhelming prevalence of acronyms in modern Hebrew speech. (Another reason is that the potential market is relatively tiny.)

I remember feeling that in English, acronyms are barely used..

Ah yes, we call them BUAs

Every time I hear an abundance of acronyms it makes think of this scene from Rocketman: https://youtu.be/ndj_dS4jImA?t=217

After checking out the link, I went to view the comments but I accidentally opened up another HN thread. I thought that I was reading satire based on this link, until I realized it was a whole set of different acronyms for a different article in AI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28790100

It took me a couple comments before that realization though.

This is all happening in Q4 at https://www.q2.com/, of course.

Thank you, good sir. I admire the sheer simplicity of your proposed solution and the wisdom contained in it.

Since my client is coming up on a SAP R/3 to S/4 transition, which is due to complete by 2027 (a real timeline), I have informed my dear colleague, a SAP enterprise architect, of a much simpler way forward that you have suggested. Sadly and disappointingly, my colleague architect has launched into rumbling and mumbling about the business transformation being more important than the technology transition. Outrageous and completely unheard of.

This is some great content marketing by Taloflow.

Having not paid attention to this story I didn’t realize they chose R because it was one letter behind S in the alphabet.

If Cloudflare was a smaller company they’d probably get sued pretty fast. That has happened for much sillier and vain reasons. But I doubt there’s much to gain via the courts in the current state of things. This seems to be standard price competition that all commodity like products resort to.

If consumers are so likely to confuse "S3" and "R2" that a court would grant trademark enforcement to S3 over this, then Mazda could have successfully sued BMW over the confusion between MX-2 and M3, not to mention the total havoc such a court judgment would wreak upon the SMT labeling industry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28777350

If Cloudflare had an entire AWS-simulation business and was making a clear effort to confuse customers about being "just like AWS, only not Amazon", then that might be an easier case to win, but Cloudflare seems pretty dead-set on being different than AWS (for example, they offer customer support), so that's unlikely.

Amazon might still sue just as saber-rattling, but that would open them up to a SLAPP countersuit, against a party that has repeatedly demonstrated that it is willing to fund lawyers to punish those abusing the legal system — not to mention being mocked around the world for suing over a two character product name with no shared characters.

AWS has customer support

Their (paid) Enterprise Support is quite good, in my experience.

I've also had good experiences with the paid support when a deployment went horribly wrong. However, the support costs real money so it's back to Google for us. Luckily we're running on EKS now so it's probably easier to diagnose without a paid customer support rep than CodeDeploy.

  > Cloudflare seems pretty dead-set on being different
  > than AWS (for example, they offer customer support

In my experience with problems that I have caused in my AWS environments, AWS has excellent support.

Lucky you! And I've recently had a bad experience with Cloudflare support, but I'm still making my offhand comment, because recently an AWS sales rep told me that the formal support process for one of their enterprise products is, paraphrased, "post to a discussion forum, and if I'm not on vacation, I'll see it and escalate internally to get you support" in as many words. I actually restated it to them to confirm and they paused noticeably before unhappily saying "Yes, that's correct". So it'll be a while before they earn back my respect in that particular regard — I may be upset at receiving poor support one time, but it's still better than not even having a ticketing system available from the other.

AWS has 24/7 phone/email/chat support on the business and enterprise support plans (with severity-based SLAs) with not only a ticketing system but a case management API, and business hours support on their developer support plan. Your sales rep sounds like they just want to maintain control of the relationship.

On Azure you can file a ticket and an engineer will be blowing up your phone in short order. That's on the developer plan. The expensive enterprise planes are the exact same support only faster with a guaranteed SLA.

Azure smokes AWS on docs, community, and support. Just my experience...over and over again.

I'm at a huge high profile company where we have dedicated AWS staff. We have a dedicated email address at AWS to reach them. First time I tried to use the email address I got no reply at all. Took a while to figure out it had changed. I had formed my above-stated opinion long before that whilst trying to use various services and referring to their docs and community to navigate all the undocumented and out of date cruft. This is almost a decade now of the same experience.

> Azure smokes AWS on docs, community, and support. Just my experience...over and over again.

Great. If only their tech stack was at the same level.

In terms of support (filing tickets) we can generally get on a call with AWS in a matter of minutes. If there's one thing that's annoying, is the status page. We'll often get notified of outages by our account rep way before there's anything in the status page.

If only their tech stack was at the same level.

No joke. Sometimes I appreciate the way Azure has chosen to differentiate itself in terms of developer experience.

Then there are times using it when I want to walk into an ocean.

Interestingly, those times seem to be anytime I have to deal with Application Insights or LogAnalytics. Azure, if anyone working on those two products are reading this, y’all need to go read up on this thing called ‘correlation’ because the Azure native logging and APM is…

whistles

boy.

It’s something. I just love waiting 5-15 minutes just to see a log line, if I even see it at all with how routinely problematic and unstable their logging infrastructure is[1]

[1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-monitor-status/...

(We’re already looking to get away from LA though)

Not my experience. We're waiting for them to sort out a broken Azure AD B2C instance for over a year.

B2C sounds a lot like E2C which is close to EC2!

Yup, I second this. At a past job we needed support for Kafka, and their tech support's advice was so fantastic that it was actually circulated around the company for general reading. We had an entire team of people who were expert in Kafka - including myself - to the point of having given widely viewed talks etc, and we learned a lot from them. I can't rate it highly enough.

That said, it's famous that there's a very big difference between the different tiers of AWS support. When I say 'tier', I just mean in the sense of how far your query gets escalated, though it's possible that only large clients get to be escalated to the very high tiers. (We were worth billions and spent near enough a million a month, so we were at least a t2.large to them.)

Circumstances are more complicated than I wish to go into here, but everyone did well at their jobs, so I have no latent upset with anyone over it.

I also have nothing to complain about AWS paid support

AFAIK, you can describe a product as "just like AWS, only not Amazon" without any problem as long as you are clear enough that it's not Amazon, and that "like" is really "like".

IMHO, there is very little risk consumers will confuse Cloudfare for a major Cloud provider

CloudFront and CloudFlare was confusing for me.

The MX-3 started production in 1991, the M3 started production in 1986, so if anything BMW would have been suing Mazda in this situation ;-)

> then Mazda could have successfully sued BMW over the confusion between MX-2 and M3

Assuming you mean the MX-3 (I can't find any reference to such a thing as a Mazda MX-2), it would hopefully have been the other way around -- BMW suing Mazda, since the M3 predates the MX-3 by half a decade:

> M3 models have been produced for every generation of 3 Series since the E30 M3 was introduced in 1986. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_M3

> The Mazda MX-3[4] is a four-seat coupé manufactured and marketed by Mazda, introduced at the Geneva Auto Show in March 1991[5] and marketed for model years 1992–1998. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazda_MX-3

These model numbers are rife, and hardly unique to the brands. If you were to shorten Tesla's Model 3, you'd have the TM3.

And back to Mazda, they have a very successful "3" that _could_ be described as an M3. :)

If anything it's nice that there's some consistency between at least a few brands on the numbering - if you see a 3, you'll know it's likely a medium sized car.

Ugh I looked up MX-2 instead of MX-3, thanks for the correction. The point stands, but it seems lost in the noise due to my off-by-one. Oh well.

Sorry, I don't get what you mean? Yes, you were off by one in the model name, writing "MX-2" in stead of "MX-3", but both I and a sibling comment corrected for that, disussing the actually existing MX-3 in stead of the non-existent "MX-2". So what's the "noise" here, in your opinion? It was your actual point that was disproved.

Yes, there is no such thing as a "Mazda MX-2", and never was. I went directly to Wikipedia last time, but that has pretty much every other car model that ever existed, so I saw no reason to believe a "Mazda MX-2" ever existed. And now that I've googled for your exact term, here are most of the top hits:

Speculation from 2009 about a coming new model (possibly for 2013) -- which was sparsely reported even at the time, and apparently never materialised (since no actual specifications, prices, tests, or reviews show up in at least the first five pages of Google results):

https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/mazda/32905/mazda-mx-2-reveale...

https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1033621_mazda-working-on...

https://www.drive.com.au/news/2013-mazda-mx-2-rendered-specu...

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/cgi-2013-mazda-mx-2-8195....

https://www.burlappcar.com/2009/06/mazda-mx2-coming-up.html

https://www.tv2.no/a/12383893/ (in Norwegian)

A few auto trading sites that purport to have pages related to it (my guess: from mistyped searches), but which turn out to contain other models (mostly MX-5's, with the odd Mazda 2 sprinkled in):

https://www.gumtree.com/cars/uk/mazda/mazda+mx+2

https://www.newsnow.co.uk/classifieds/cars-vans-for-sale/maz...

https://cars.trovit.co.uk/used-cars/mazda-mx-2

https://www.ebay-kleinanzeigen.de/s-autos/mazda-mx-2/k0c216 (in German)

And that's it. So, to sum up:

1) There is no "Mazda MX-2", there never was.

2) The only "noise" here was your typo; if you were talking about actually existing cars, you must obviously have meant the MX-3. You were after all talking about model names clashing with the M 3.

3) This was corrected for in the discussion; what was discussed was your actual point, not the "noise" (your typo).

4) If for some incomprehensible reason you actually meant the non-existent "Mazda MX-2", our point against it stands even firmer than with the MX-3: The BMW M3 would have predated the "MX-2", had it materialised in 2013, by 27 years in stead of merely five. If anyone had been able to sue anyone, it would still have been BMW, not Mazda.

So no, your point doesn't stand.

And I'm utterly baffled: Where are you -- still! -- claiming to have "looked up MX-2" from???

Swap which was one first, I meant. It was either M3 or MX. Sounds like it was M3. So, “BMW could have sued Mazda” instead of “Mazda could have sued BMW”, which ultimately has no material effect whatsoever on the point I’m making, since I could have chosen any number of non-BMW, non-Mazda examples there. I’m sorry that you felt compelled to write a page-long proof that BMW was first; no argument here! And I hope you’re enjoying your M3 :)

Hah, I wish! (Why didn't you give me an M8 while you were at it? I drive a Tiguan -- the one with a 1.4 l engine. :-)

But you're really not very good at reading, are you? That was not "a page-long proof that BMW was first", it was an at most half-page-long proof that there never was a "Mazda MX2". And you also seem to have missed my question how you still, two days later, claim to have "looked up the MX-2". I've pointed out twice now that there is no such thing, so where did you look that up?

I don't know, sorry. I've already admitted defeat repeatedly here, so you're welcome to keep pressing me if you like, but I don't have any more data to offer you in light of this latest reply. Maybe I typo'd it when I was researching because I'm terrible at mobile touchscreens, and since I'm also dyslexic I misread MX-3 as MX-2. I don't know for sure, and obviously I'm not very familiar with Mazda or BMW model numbers, but I'm not going to dig into my browser history to try and answer your question, because — again — none of this is materially relevant to the point or to the discussion. Oops, I screwed up. Moving on.

>If Cloudflare had an entire AWS-simulation business and was making a clear effort to confuse customers about being "just like AWS, only not Amazon", then that might be an easier case to win

Well, I'm pretty sure THAT'S not a problem they have to worry about any time soon.

Wait until you find out why the giant evil computer is named HAL!

Ive Been Meaning to make that comment

Everyone knows it’s fom « Heuristic Algorithm » ;)

I thought it was Hardware Abstraction Layer.

Judge: What does S3 even stand for?

Amazon: Simple Storage Solutions, sir.

Judge: Ok, and what does R2 stand for?

CF: Uhhh....it's one less than S3, sir.

Judge: Ok, and what does R2D2 stand for?

Lucas: Why am I here?

History rhymes with itself?

"Amazon Web Services reportedly named its cloud database RedShift in order to tweak Oracle"

"RedShift was apparently named very deliberately as a nod to Oracle’ trademark red branding"

https://www.geekwire.com/2018/amazon-web-services-reportedly...

As Intel found out when they were unable to stop AMD naming their Intel 486 compatible CPU Am486, there's a certain threshold of creativity a name has to reach for trademark protection.

These short letter/number sequences aren't it.

Smaller companies than Cloudflare have used similar naming for S3 compatible services without issue, see Backblaze B2

Meanwhile Microsoft is just like...let's called it "Blob"

Microsoft Blob. That has a certain ring to it.

Blob blob blob!

Sorry, what's that Dory?

Microsoft Loblaw law blog

Are you sure it's not Microsoft Azure Blob Storage Solution for Enterprise 2020?

You’re missing a 365 in there.

Live .net

Did you mean the NFS one or the S3 one?

They'd already used Bob.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob

"Xbox One X Series X Service Pack 1 September Refresh CTP Preview 3 Update 5a*. I mean, imma buy it, but lord MSFT sucks at naming stuff" [0]

"I once worked on the unambiguously named "Microsoft Visual Studio .NET Tools For Microsoft Office .NET System 2005". Yes, it had "Microsoft" and ".NET" in the name twice. When the name was announced we all laughed as we assumed it was a joke. It was not." [1]

[0] https://nitter.net/shanselman/status/1205355248715358215

[1] https://nitter.net/ericlippert/status/1205372172534874112

Microsoft Visual Studio .NET Tools For Microsoft Office .NET System 2005 was pretty great at the time, being able to automate Excel in C# and not have to use VBA was very nice.

The whole thing is like german agglutinative nouns. Bits of product keep piling up, but each one has the most generic possible name. But the least forgivable one has to be the XBox One X. I hadn't even realised there was an XBox One X Series X.

Me neither. I thought it was Xbox Series X, not to be confused with the Xbox Series S.

https://www.xbox.com/en-US/consoles/xbox-series-x

https://www.xbox.com/en-US/consoles/xbox-series-s

Wow I thought AWS Systems Manager Session Manager was bad.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/systems-manager/latest/userguide...

What about Visual Studio Code not having anything to with Visual Studio.

It's even worse than that because Azure has block blobs, page blobs, and append blobs.

I'll never not link this video when it comes to Microsoft naming and branding:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k

That was fun and a good throwback.

But it was interesting to see in the comments that MS actually claimed credit for it:

"It was an internal-only video clip commissioned by our packaging [team] to humorously highlight the challenges we have faced RE: packaging and to educate marketers here about the pitfalls of packaging/branding"

I didn't know that, but it's cool, and I think shows that Microsoft had a healthy culture.

If you can laugh at yourself, you can learn and grow. Companies aren't a monolithic hive-mind (even Microsoft!)

I still love that video.

O(1)?

Edit: the site didn't make it, I just think the stylized name was cool.

O for Object and (1) cause it's fast.

Or it would be. I'm not building it.

O-1, On1?

I believe that the Japanese had an airplane with that designation once, famous for use in suicide attacks, but I cannot find reference to it. Some other models with Zero in the name I can find, but not the P-0.

Apparently the Zero was officially the "Navy Type 0 carrier fighter".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_A6M_Zero

I assume Q1 is just a service called Queen - it excels at everything and looks amazing doing it.

this is legit a much better name while also being reductio ad absurdum, it also follows the convention (R2 = rapid, reliable, S3= simple storage service, O1 = object)

"Order one".. nice subliminal messaging.

Wouldn't T4 have been a better name? sure it does create the risk of a U5, but prequels are not usually better. (Unless you love endless discussion about intergalactic politics).

Three years ago I sat in front of a whiteboard with some folks and we sketched out the future roadmap for Cloudflare Workers. Here's a picture of that whiteboard: https://imgur.com/a/nSnrT15

We went with "R2" because it better reflects the fact that we want it to be S3 minus one thing: egress fees.

Q1 will be R2 minus one thing: storage fees.

P0 has already been built: https://devnull-as-a-service.com/

I love the filename on their cleanup script "gift to the open source community":

https://devnull-as-a-service.com/one-less-to-go.sh

  sudo rm -rf $(sudo find / -type f -print0 | shuf -n1 -z)

Certainly not in Canada. T4 is the name of employment income tax slip here, similar to W-2 in the US.

I imagine most people who complain about intergalactic politics in the prequels must have never gotten to the scene in A New Hope where people just sit around and discuss the dissolution of the galactic senate and the political reordering of the galaxy.

That's what my NAS is called

When I worked at Cloudflare a long time ago, we had a code name for the Global Loadbalancers we were working on named G6. F5 + 1

What I like about the name R2 is the statement that they are aiming to make something better than S3. These are the kinds of competitions that benefit the consumers a ton. I don’t care who wins as long as things continue to get better.

You can do this with HAL too:

  IBM
  HAL
  GZK
  FYJ
  EXI
  DWH
  CVG
  BUF
  ATE
  ...

EXI and BUF sound pausible. ATE is IBM minus eight, which is a nice coincidence.

R2 is marketed as "one less than S3!"

I used the exact same tagline for a project open sourced in 2019: https://github.com/pachyderm/s2/

So there you go VCs, I can market as well as cloudflare. Money please!

Reminds me of HAL Laboratory (videogame developer involved with the original Super Smash Bros. and its sequel, Super Smash Bros. Melee) who did the same thing except with IBM.

Was that before or after HAL in 2001 space odyssey?

Definitely later :D

I would just like to give some respect to Backblaze B2 in here!

B2 is nice but horrendously slow.

A couple of months ago I was playing with BackBlaze and Oracle cloud. For some reason, mounting a Backblaze storage (using FUSE S3 and BB S3 compatibility ) in Oracle cloud was terribly slow. When I tried exactly the same in an AWS EC2 instance it was quite fast. No idea why that happened.

Though funny (kinda hilarious at A-41 actually) this applet misses the point that R2 was chosen because CloudFlare was undercutting Amazon in every way possible, including the product name.

If this trend continues, one day they'll pay me to store my data on their service. Imagine being paid to generate random hashes and store them on the internet. ;)

Presumably that's a clever joke about cryptocurrencies. It took me a while to convince myself that the analogy made sense, and I'm not sure how much I appreciate it, but I suppose that slow confirmation times and questionable value are to be expected when dealing with cryptocurrencies.

Slow confirmation times aren't really a thing anymore - ETH transactions confirm in about 15 seconds for me, although it's expensive for small to medium amounts (~$8 to send eethereum, ~$25 to send ERC20 tokens, ~$80 to do a Uniswap swap).

Decentralized Cloud Storage services, like Storj DCS – are really interesting when compared to R2/S3. They are compatible with AWS S3, but with better economics than both R2 and S3 (1/10 price of amazon) - https://docs.storj.io/dcs/getting-started/quickstart-aws-sdk...

Is it worth it to host some disks for this?

Yeah, as long as you have good uptime. Check out storj.io/node

That's one direction to take the series. OR S3 needs to add P0, and R2 needs to add D2. Can't wait till AZ16, invests in Z-16, and releases their S1.

I think they should have rubbed it in with E0 == egress is zero.

Well logically it's P1 next, right? An AI that takes over the world? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1414021.The_Adolescence_...

The letter before R is Q.

Not anymore!

Interesting!

    var o=r.__SECRET_INTERNALS_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED.ReactCurrentOwner,u=Object.prototype.hasOwnProperty

Side note: I must say, Taloflow really knows how to capitalize on that HN traffic flow. :)

Sometimes this goes from R2 to Q1 (makes sense), but sometimes it goes to H1. Is there an alphabet that puts H right before R?

Fixed, added a thank you for you in the console!

>Sometimes this goes from R2 to Q1 (makes sense), but sometimes it goes to H1. Is there an alphabet that puts H right before R?

And this one goes to 11...Oh wait, wrong movie. Sorry.

And the successor to the programming language "S" was "R". And C became... C++? D? Rust?

That's why I like Google Cloud naming. Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, Cloud Build, Kubernetes, ...

Google Cloud yes, Google Play Music All Access not so much.

I like how the progress bars moves off screen if you get too excited with the button. Point made :)

Anybody know the logic behind the counter? It sometimes jumps over numbers.

All of them increase the score by 1 except:

Free Storage!!!!

That increases by 10. I took out the "You Gave Away Too Much Free Storage" which was a -20 :P

With every Click, I heard "Jack Barker's" voice from Silicon Valley

Does it bother anyone else that the distance between S3 and R2 is sqrt(2), not 1?

R2 means “Really Requestable” from their website, really..

I think we could all see a pattern in the product names but I was hoping for more:

  EMC Q1 (using Dell servers?)
  Google P0
  iCloud O-1

It looks like passive aggression from AWS engineers.

Is this the new cookie clicker?

Shades of NCR vs. IBM, to call back to an even older school acronym pissing match.

Some company is going to break the mold with "Company Name Object Store"

That would have to be Oracle: https://www.oracle.com/mx/cloud/storage/object-storage.html

Points for linking to the Mexican version.

Clicked before reading title, pressed button like mad. I originally thought it was one of those Elon Musk random child name generators.

Q1 baby.

I was really hoping it'd go into unicode characters.

The negative numbers take away from this bigly

What would you suggest? After 0 go back to 2,147,483,647?

This is almost as fun as Cookie Clicker!

call it whatever u like, looks like a fantastic product to me! i hope they can sustain this...

Q1 is pretty cute, actually.

S-23 lol

I need your fedora, your sandals, and your segway.

Profits Q4?

Azure P1 ?

When is cloudflare rolling out its cloud hosting service?

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