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Comment by AdamH12113 | Hacker News Reader

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".)

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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.

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