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Comment by andreif | Hacker News Reader

That's completely opposite to my experience. Do you have any examples of AWS naming that you think is "teenage boy trying to be cool"? I am genuinely curious.

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BigQuery - Athena

Pub/Sub - Kinesis

Cloud CDN - CloudFront

Cloud Domains - Route 53

...

Pub/sub is more like SNS or EventBridge Bus to me

I thought you meant API and parameters. Blaming them for product names is weird to me.

why is that?

Why it's weird to blame them for product names? Because their purpose slightly different. I can see where negativity comes from and understand, but product name is a lot less important as consistent API experience. AWS is the best among big players by far, hats off and well-done to their teams and leadership. I hope the others will finally learn and follow.

My issue isn't just with the names themselves but they are emblematic of AWS's overall mentality. They want to have the AWS(TM) solution to X business case while other cloud providers feel more like utilities that give you building blocks. This obviously works for them and many of their customers I just personally don't care for it. It is probably to do with the level of complexity I am working at (*which is not very complex).

Also, I don't think trying to emulate AWS's support and consistent API makes sense as a strategy for other cloud providers. They will never beat AWS at their own game, it is light years ahead. If cloud providers want to survive they need to fill a different niche and try different things.

> while other cloud providers feel more like utilities that give you building blocks.

Idk why you don't see AWS as a utility providing building blocks.

> I don't think trying to emulate AWS's support and consistent API makes sense as a strategy for other cloud providers.

Those are such essential things. It's very hard to imagine prioritising something else and succeeding in anything.

It's nice when things do what they say on the tin. That being said, it's hard to build a "brand" when you start out with a generic name.

How many popular products have you named and launched? Naming products is hard to meet both usability and marketing objectives. This has never been as big of a problem for me, as GCPs APIs for example. Those are the true evil. Product names I care little for.

> How many popular products have you named and launched?

One, and you often times only need one.

aws api and param names are stupidly long CamelCased and not even consistent half the time like a leaky abstraction over their underlying implementation

You remember any example? I don't call API directly and usually use CLI/SDK/CDK that work a lot better than gcloud. I did see some inconsistencies between services (e.g. updating params for SQS and SNS) and that could definitely be improved. But honestly, comparing to GCP mess, AWS is ten times better.

Perfect list, also:

Google Cloud Run - Lambda

Sure I get the reference to the underlying algebraic representation of coding but come on, Lambda tells us nothing of what it does.

Products (not brands, products) should be named in a way that means something to the customer afaic.

> Perfect list, also:

> Google Cloud Run - Lambda

ECS is the AWS equivalent of Cloud Run. GCP Cloud Functions are the equivalent of AWS Lambda.

ECS / Cloud Run = managed container service that autoscales

Lambda / Cloud Functions = serverless functions as a service

Thanks for the clarification hadn’t appreciated the difference. Also somewhat reiterates my point which is nice as well

Have you named any successful product?

Yes, named a product and sold over 100,000 units of them. Naming products is hard but not that hard.

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