AWS Icon Quiz | Hacker News Reader

AWS Icon Quiz

awsiconquiz.com

278 pointswhatsthenews167 comments

Oh hell I have spent the last decade working with AWS and I still have no idea what any of the icons are. They are all complete shit. Literally the worst.

To be fair I can't remember half the product names other than the core ones either. Elastic Banana or whatever. Maybe Dynamo Donkey. I just don't know any more.

Edit: I'm also an AWS Architect Professional or whatever it's called now. Shows how a monkey can pass the certs eh?

I worked at AWS for 7 years and only got 1/20

That's almost impressive; you did 3x worse than random!

Edit: nope, I have no idea. I forgot the number of options and type of questions varies quite a bit.

I was the primary maintainer for one of the services they asked about, and I still got that question wrong. 4/20 for me, but three were lucky guesses

are you saying 420 is reason for not doing well?

They got 4 out of 20 correct on the quiz

420 is a meme name for weed

I think most of us get it, but those sorts of low quality/non-discussion comments are frowned upon at HN.

3/20 and two correct ones were guesses here; I was actually wondering what's wrong with me, asking "Dude, have you ever even seen the AWS console at this point?" (I have in fact stared at it way too much). Goes to show a lot of these icons just aren't very distinctive and don't seem to matter much.

3/20 by purely guessing, out of the big 3 cloud providers it's the only one I have no experience with.

Shockingly, one of those I got right was "select 4 out of 6".

“Select 4 out of 6” is just as hard as “select 2 out of 6”, at 1:15, so it’s not that shockingly.

I thought I did poorly with my 3/20 as an Associate Solutions Architect.

Holy shit this is hilarious

To be fair, the pareto principle applies....80% of services are only relevant 20% of the time. If that.

Worth noting that also from experience that applies to the amount of effort they put into services. Most of the non-core ancillary services are buggy garbage. I'm wondering if we're going to cause an integer overflow on the support ticket system the way we're going.

Probably 20% of the services power the other 80% under the hood too.

It’s funny you say that. I work at AWS. The URls for tickets just rolled over to have a new digit this week

Well at least I won't have to open a ticket for that :D

To be fair, the majority of professional interaction with AWS should be via text interfaces - infrastructure as code, SDKs, commandline - where icons don't matter.

The names aren't often all that much better, of course

Possible according to the infinite monkey theorem.

If you pass this, a team of medical professionals will be sent to your home to peacefully euthanize you, as it is the only ethical choice to end your suffering.

I sense a business opportunity: Euthanasia as a Service. EaaS. With an API.

The real question is: can I configure it with a CloudFormation stack?

No but a beta Terraform provider is available. Just don’t forget to import the existing resource lest strange things happen.

Ahem, did you mean OpenTF?

Terraform doesn't make me want to use EaaS though.

No, we provide a CDK L3 construct that ensures your best practice.

now that's hot

Kind of. It's only supported via an embedded Lambda code block written in a version of NodeJS that will expire in about two months.

Also, please exercise caution with your targets file. We have had a few customers complain that it's easy to mix up your targets list with a customer database dump in S3, in which case it will alphabetically and systematically begin killing them off. This is particularly bad as there's a delay before each transaction hits the AWS billing API, which may result in unusually high costs for the month and/or delays until your bill warning alerts fire.

Can't wait until Corey Quinn finds a way run a container on this one

What should the icon look like?

I've got this great idea involving three small floating boxes.

Great minds! I was thinking a nice orange or blue?

I’ve heard google has an alpha version of this for internal use only.

From time to time they let it run loose to clean up their products.

We were going to adopt it but after internal discussions, we’re worried they’ll euthanize it after 22 months. We’re pivoting.

No trials, credit card required.

But is the icon going to be a syringe, a pill or a tombstone?

Three cuboids (with a slightly larger cuboid off to the side).

Is this service only available to those who pass the test?

Spoken like a true software/devops engineer…

In a war between Man and Machine, this could be a CAPTCHA against humans. The kind that only robots can get right.

After working solely with AWS for 11+ years I managed to answer 3/20 correctly…What a relief.

Glad I’m not alone. Been using AWS since like 2009 and I got basically everything wrong.

We are excited to introduce the AWS Elastic Icon Identifier, a service designed to simplify your AWS Management Console navigation by quickly identifying AWS service icons. This service offers Icon Recognition, enabling you to instantly identify an uploaded AWS icon; an Icon Library with a continuously updated collection of AWS service icons; and API Integration, allowing you to programmatically identify AWS icons in your applications. Additionally, it ensures High Availability with extra redundancy layers and built-in Fault Tolerance to handle unforeseen issues without service impact. This not only accelerates the learning curve for new users but also helps experienced users efficiently identify unfamiliar icons or refresh their memory on lesser-used services.

The pricing is designed to be cost-effective for all users, with a Free Tier of 100 icon identifications per month, a Pay-as-you-go plan at $0.01 per icon after the first 100, and a Premium Plan at $10/month for 1000 identifications, with extra identifications at $0.008 per icon. All plans include unlimited access to the Icon Library and API Integration, as well as High Availability and Fault Tolerance features at no additional cost. For more details, visit our Pricing page on the AWS website.

Start simplifying your AWS experience with the Elastic Icon Identifier today!

AWS Elastic Icon Identifier is just a fork of Open Icon Identifier. AWS does this shit all the time. LOL

Open Icon Identifier wants to move to a different license but are afraid of user reaction.

Don't worry, the original developer who started the project has a created a fork with the new license.

They removed some of the enterprise functionality and has rewritten that part as a closed source product. The core will remain open source forever.

>Premium Plan at $10/month for 1000 identifications

Is this really an Elastic service?

What about SQS and Step Function integrations? I need to integrate this into my production workflows ASAP to meet my quarterly targets.

Of course, you will need to assign the appropriate IAM Role per icon type.

This reminded me of AWS in plain English https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/

This is a hilarious blog.

Honestly, it’s not just the icons but the names as well. A lot of them are completely unrelated to the product and make no sense

Amazon Drawer of Old Android Devices has a certain ring to it.

https://i.redd.it/lzveac55vqb61.jpg

Yeah, ok, thanks "Entra" https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/fun... :rolling_eyes:

Oh dear! I'm not even an azure user and I know what AD is and does. Why are they throwing out all their brand recognition for "Entra"??

I correct people on this daily just because I think its hilarious they changed the name.

The exception that proves the rule.

But my goodness, what an exception....

Some of these names are actually worse. For example they propose "Unlimited FTP Server" for what is essentially an HTTP-Blob-Storage.

> SWF

> Amazon EC2 Queue

Nothing to do with EC2 but okay.

More like Amazon Distributed Functions.

It's interesting to me that many of the non-AWS products they list under "it's like" have equally incomprehensible names.

API Gateway

Should have been called: API Proxy

It's like: 3Scale

SNS

Should have been called: Amazon Messenger

It's like: UrbanAirship, Twilio

Kinesis

Should have been called: Amazon High-Throughput

It's like: Kafka

(It always gets me that someone actually named a large software product "Kafka".)

It makes me wonder too how many of these actually _are_ the "it's like". For example, I know that Elasticache actually is redis or memcached... makes me wonder if Kinesis isn't actually Kafka rebranded.

Pretty sure it's not Kafka. Kafka is way more complicated than Kinesis is and has a completely different API.

It's not. Kinesis was around before Kafka became the de-facto tool for data streaming. AWS has a separate managed Kafka service called MSK, which came much later.

Kafka was made at Linkedin and then opensourced in Jan 2011, almost 3 years before AWS Kinesis (Dec 2013).

I guess the point is not that other companies also have products with unrelated names, but if you happen to be familiar with Y then saying "Amazon x is just Amazon's version of Y" is very succinct.

> Kafka

Same. Though, I forget what it is since I heard about it. Now I think it's funny that it could refer to either cruel bureaucracy or turning into a bug.

Most of these are really funny, but I feel like they should have just left out the reasonable ones. There's enough of them that it kind of kills the humor after a certain amount of "actually this one is fine" imo.

For people despairing about their ability to score on this quiz asking such simple things as what color is the S3 icon. The quiz is using the Cloud Formation Designer icons not the ones you see every day in the console or in the icon asset pack from the AWS site you might be using in your architecture diagrams. So unless you spend a load of time using that to build your CFTs rejoice you shouldn't be surprised you're getting them wrong since they are not consistent across those locations.

Oh, I vaguely remember these icons being used in the UI but now the UI has flat and more brightly coloured icons.

Thank you. While they're familiar, I couldn't figure out where to go to see these cuboid icon variants. Spent a few minutes clicking around the Console and the AWS web site / marketing pages, and didn't encounter a single one. When I think AWS icons, I only know the AWS Console favicons and thumbnails in Console search results.

I was perplexed when it offered ELB as an answer when I've only known ELB to exist within EC2 and share its icon.

I was really confused too going through when I got to "What color is the S3 icon?" I was happy to finally get one and confidently answered green only to be told I was wrong. I even went to check the console and it was green, that's when I started wondering where they were pulling these from and someone else mentioned it.

As a designer, I just want to say that if your instinct is to rag on these symbols for being incomprehensible, go ahead and try your hand at one or two. It may be humbling.

Illustrating abstract concepts that are similar to other, related abstract concepts is extremely difficult. Remember that it's got to be legible in a footprint of a couple dozen pixels on a side. When you're done, make sure it isn't close enough to any other AWS product symbols that customers would get confused. Also, run it by a committee of people who aren't designers, and are proud of that fact. If they are in a senior position, attempt to integrate their feedback, no matter how idiotic, into your design, because nobody's going to fight for a little thing like an icon symbol.

I stopped making logos, it's a really difficult and thankless job. Designing apps for complex use cases is way simpler.

Not a fan of either, but Azure icons look like actual things: http://code.benco.io/icon-collection/azure-icons/

The AWS icons seem procedurally generated based on a hash of each concept's name.

Yeah, limiting yourself to minor variations of a 3x3x3 cube is pretty rough.

GCP shows you can have strong brand consistency (even a limited color palette) while still having decent illustrations [1].

[1] https://www.turbogeek.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/word-...

I didn't expect this when I clicked on the comment thread, but yeah, GCP has the best icons and its design element is the secret hero of the story.

> I stopped making logos, it's a really difficult and thankless job.

Just ask more money for it then :-)

But in the case of aws it’s so bad, why even have an icon at all?

The only reason I can play this game is because "Icons with Labels" is impossible to deal with in the AWS console. I _really_ wish I could just set the labels myself.

"AWS Simple Email Service." Were you worried I would forget it's an AWS service? Or worried that I wouldn't remember it's simple, or a service? Do you offer any other email service? Can I please just rename the label to "SES"?

First world cloud console problems, I guess.

and then there's "flip a coin" about whether it's "AWS Foo" or "Amazon Foo". I think I once read that Amazon Foos were things that were used internally, too, and AWS Foos were things only sold to pay for rocket fuel and yachts (I kid, I kid; paying for all those Graviton fabs is some serious $$$ too)

My favorite is "Amazon Web Services Systems Manager Session Manager".

You surprised me for a second and I thought you had found an example of where they actually _wrote out_ Amazon Web Services in the title of something and I was going to claim they must get paid by the letter or something, but no, it's just "AWS Systems Manager ..." https://docs.aws.amazon.com/systems-manager/latest/userguide...

Still, yes, a good r/TitleGore find there :-D

I think a Managed NAT Gateway or two ought to cover those.

Oddly, https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ continues that AWS/Amazon schizophrenia.

AWS ___ ones can only be used with the rest of the AWS ecosystem. Amazon ___ can be used as a standalone service.

Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon S3, Amazon Chime etc. vs AWS CloudFormation, AWS CodeCommit etc.

> Do you offer any other email service

AWS WorkMail is a (different kind of) email services, and AWS Simple Notification Service has email delivery functionality. So, yes?

It's not a real AWS service unless there's a way to run containers with it.

That's why I think Adobe has made the smart move. They simply use English as the icon, color as the impression.

You can guess via the English if you are unfamiliar with the icon. And easy to spot via the color if you already know the icon.

Let's say if I forget the characters in the Illustrator icon. But I can recognize the icon is Illustrator because of its orange color.

I think Microsoft was even better, at least on the number of users that recognized the blue W for making documents the e icon to get online, etc. That's how my mom did it, but she would have no idea what Ps, Il, Ae, would mean

And if you arrange the icons right on your task bar, you can make it spell lewd things.

That gets harder if you have 200+ products.

I tried my level best and got 2/20. I repeated with random guesses and got 5/20. I have used AWS on-and-off since 2018.

AWS icons are next to Egyptian hieroglyphs in difficulty. Google iconography isn't so bad (but bad enough still.)

Agreed - I've been working with AWS almost daily for the last four years and got 4/20.

I got 4 out of 20, but 3 were just lucky guesses.

There was only one icon that I could guess from the context. The mobile analytics icon looked like a bar-chart and the other options were things like Kinesis and other services that didn't match the icon.

https://app.awsiconquiz.com/_next/image?url=%2Fimages%2Fques...

I have red green color blindness (deuteranopia) and i have no idea if my answer is right or wrong on until i change my monitor settings to high saturation. (I usually turn that off because it messes a lot with other colors)

^+1

Does it show which one is correct when you get it wrong? It would be cool to see what all the others were too.

Unhelpfully it does not.

I hope this is made by an obsessive graphic designer at AWS who's lost one too many arguments.

This was hilarious. Some of descriptions are great. "Dried arterial blood" is a nice vivid color descriptor.

It really puts into context how meaningless these icons are. I log into AWS all the time and did terrible on this quiz (4/20), despite having seen some of these icons hundreds of times at least.

I've been an AWS Hero for a decade, and I only got 5 out of 20 (and I was only sure on 1, the other 4 were guesses).

Obviously this is a joke to point out how useless the icons are, but I'd have thought working with them for so long I'd at least know a few of them.

I want to take this quiz, but why do I have to click three times to get to the next question instead of one?

Perhaps it's to match the class-leading usability of the AWS web console.

It’s to mirror the AWS user experience.

It definitely feels like Amazon had some intern project that generated 'spatial catpchas' (prove you are human by picking the stacked blue boxes) and decided to re-use it for every icon.

Hint for those who are struggling: Guess randomly to improve your score.

Is there no way to see the correct answers after finishing the quiz?

Some comments say that the game tries to match AWS console usability, so probably not.

I've contributed and/or led development on at least 4 different AWS consoles and have used AWS every day for the last 10 years, with 8 of those working at AWS. Still only got 6 right on the quiz.

That said, AWS is transitioning away from those 3D logos. I just wish they'd transition away from Amazon vs AWS name prefix confusion. I've read the internal notes on why they do that, but the reasoning never clicked for me and I still have no idea without looking it up.

Are you allowed to share the reasons for the different name prefixes?

AWS = things that are used with other things.

Amazon = things that can be used independently.

I.E, Amazon Simple Email Service, AWS CloudFormation

Cool quiz feels like it might be a psy op from https://www.antimetal.com/

You guys generated complaints from HN users about you spamming HN with booster comments and upvotes. I checked and the complainers were right. Doing this will get you banned here, so please avoid anything of the sort in the future.

Where do these icons come from they don't match what's used in the AWS console at all.

So many of these are weird because I mostly know of their icons from the main console page which apparently doesn't match the ones this quiz is pulling from because it said the S3 icon isn't green and the IAM icon is a key. In the console it's green and an ID with a lock icon on it at least for me.

They're used in the architecture diagrams and CloudFormation etc.

Ah ok. I've never used designer much at all so the fact they didn't match the AWS console version of things was really confusing. The first question is the 3 overlapping boxes with a play button which is supposedly the lambda icon but the console just has an orange box with a boxy white λ so I was never going to get that.

Wonder if OP could make a version of this that uses the console icons instead of the designer icons..

I think they may be an older AWS icon set. I was just doing making an infrastructure diagram in lucid chart and the S3 icon was red and I recognized it so I got it right, but it doesn't match whats in the console now

The other person has it right. It's the icon set used in Cloudformation Designer. Which doesn't even match their current icon asset packet for Powerpoint, those generally seem to use the ones used in the console from my limited survey.

https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/icons/

Made it about 1 question in before I realized it was over my head

Love me some good satire.

I don't work with AWS a lot but I thought I could probably score a few points by following their rules for their color coding: orange for compute services, blue for DB related, green for other service management related and red for storage.

I got 6.

Why tf is Route 53 the same colour as compute services?

Pretty much the only AWS logo I can recognize immediately is this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_Electoral_Action

AWS should add this to their Certifications offering.

They should add a higher tier and the test is just this.

Didnt they retire these in favor of the vector icons?

The person that designed these icons should be paid less. Maybe Bezos did it himself

Amazon's strong suit has never been design apparently...

That applies not only to icon design, but also to UX design and some other types of design too...

Repost of the old google doc quiz?

https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1026568631214198784

I got 9/20 and got called a noob - glad I'm not the only one that had a lower than perhaps expected score despite using AWS daily for years and years. Not going to miss those icons though.

How do you actually come up with good icons for these things?

I can imagine a few for things like sns, sqs, and lambda, but what's the right icon for kinesis?

much like comment elsewhere in this thread about Adobe's products, I bet one would get pretty far just using the initialisms for the service and then no one has to spend their precious braincells trying to map someone's fever dream icons for Iot-Blockchain-Whatever down to some triangles

  ______
  | IAM |
  -------
  ______
  | EKS |
  -------

Let's also pick some broad high level categories and vary the border design and color too. Boom. Instantly better.

Someone should make a Chrome plug in for this...

One issue is the uniformity of the icons, they could have different shapes and other visual cues so they don’t blend into eachother so much

Sometimes it feels like having 2000 products with obscure names and overlapping responsibilities is the end goal

I hope you got to see when the AWS InfiniDash (meme?hoax?) went around ... good times

I got 2/20 after randomly guessing.

4/20 noob, picked all As.

I actually think that AWS icons are pretty decent. If you’ve used GCP, you know what I’m talking about

Not used GCP...

Is it as bad as the "Google" folder on an android?

GCP has a mix of "that makes sense" (scheduler, run, compute, spanner) to "I can see where they were going" (memorystore, speech) with a smidge of: "that doesn't make any sense/just a fun design that isn't meaningful" (anthos).

Lots of icons are dots or squares that are connected, which of course isn't helpful because that's what nodes in a network actually are in all circumstances.

GCP is (un)fortunately saved by it's relatively low product offering (by AWS's standards at least).

> 5/20

I use a variety of AWS services every day. I actually got a higher score than I was expecting.

Should they even have any icons? Most of them don't really convey meaning, and there are so many, and many similar (rectangular prisms in different orientations), that it's impossible to remember them.

They need icons so that the utterly incomprehensible architecture diagrams that mostly would convey little useful information even if you recognized the symbols drawn by architects for administrative rather than technical reasons have the façade of a standardized, consistent language.

> Dried arterial blood red

... Horrifying

I got 3/20, because I've never used AWS professionally.

I got 3/20 and use AWS professionally

>Your Final Score Was: 4/20 Skill Level: Noob

What do people actually think of this UI? These icons give a futuristic but also depressing look at the same time.

Congrats, you just described Amazon as a whole. If anything, it is art imitating life.

Now I am very curious about how AWS made their icons. I work in AWS everyday and can barely tell any part. I thought Google was terrible...

I don't know that I should be angry or relieved that I only got half of them right. I've been working with AWS since it existed.

This deserves a prize of some sort. Genius.

Now if yEd had a way to search in the icon library... the way services are grouped is completely incomprehensible.

They also changed their icons quite a few times in the past... I agree though that they're bonkers

3/20 Have been using AWS since S3

I’m convinced the AWS icons were made by people who don’t realize how helpful names and icons can be for devs

Loll makes me feel like a bad engineer

It's possibly a sign that you are a good engineer. If you are using infrastructure-as-code, whether that is terraform or cloudformation, you are used to looking at a yaml or json file that does not include icons. If you have automated everything to the point that you rarely need to log into the AWS console, you probably don't regularly see these icons.

This is making me feel like I should turn in my Certified AWS DevOps Engineer badge.

I have not used AWS at that level, but are these actually real?

Not anymore. Pretty sure I ran into this quiz a few years ago. They moved away from the cubic logos, judging by my aws console.

Haha that's impossible. They all look the same

Clearly one icon is six cubes and another is seven.

The comments start my day with a lot of lol

Now do it with the 2021 icons

Looks like i'm a noob

my score was 5/20, every question in this quiz is uncanny :D

just realized I’m so bad at AWS

gotta love aws ux

Reply on news.ycombinator.com