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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Yes! That is confusing! Tell them to stop it!

FYI it's not a AWS term, it's a DigitalOcean term.

I could not be more confused. Does EC2 quietly call their hosting machines "droplets"? I knew "droplets" to be a DigitalOcean team, but DigitalOcean doesn't have Nitro cards.

Now I'm wondering if that's where DO got the name in the first place

Surely "droplet" is a derivative of "ocean?"

Clouds (like, the big fluffy things in the sky) are made up of many droplets of liquid. Using "droplet" to refer to the things that make up cloud computing is a pretty natural nickname for any cloud provider, not just DO. I do imagine that DO uses "droplet" as a public product branding because it works well with their "Ocean" brand, though.

...now I'm actually interested in knowing if "droplet" is derived from "ocean", or if "Digital Ocean" was derived from having many droplets (which was derived from cloud). Maybe neither.

Clouds are water vapor, not droplets.

“Cloud: Visible mass of liquid droplets or frozen crystals suspended in the atmosphere“

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

Clouds are condensed water droplets in the air. The air below the cloud has just about the same amount of water in it, but at the altitude of the bottom of the cloud, the atmosphere is cool enough for that water vapor to condense, forming the cloud.

Search terms include “lapse rate” if you would like to learn more.

I believe AWS was calling them droplets prior to digital ocean.

It’s an internal ec2 term too. We don’t use it externally and I shouldn’t have used it to avoid all this confusion.

Internally, we say droplet instead of host as there are multiple hosts/mobos per droplet these days. It’s no longer true that when you get a metal droplet, you get the entire droplet.

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