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Comment by ajonit | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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).

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

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.

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....

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

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.

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.

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