Corey Quinn Profile picture
Dec 5, 2018 36 tweets 4 min read
Proposal: all AWS service names get a 30 second review from me before they ship.

“Route53?”
“Love it.”
“Snowball Edge?”
“Urban Dictionary both of those words.”
“Systems Manager Session Mana—wow that sounds terrible now that I hear it spoken aloud.”

I’m here to help.
“Fargate?”

“Sounds clever, but nobody will know what it does.”
“Timestream?”
“I have a giant repo of Doctor Who references.”
“We’ll risk it.”
“The repo is bigger on the inside.”
“Managed Blockch—WHY DID YOU SLAP ME?!”
“The better question is why nobody else did before this moment.”
“Okay, so you want to call this one ‘Firecracker?’ I’m not optimistic; sell me.”
“People will use it to try to implement Lambda themselves and blow their hands off in the process.”
“That name is just PERFECT! Why haven’t you been promot—“
“My last day is this Friday.”
“DAMMIT!”
"What do you think about Inferentia?"
"My grandfather had that. It got pretty brutal towards the end. It's rough on everyone around when you start losing cognitive--wait, say that one again? I'm positive I didn't hear you properly..."
"Graviton."
"Terrific if the next word in the product name is 'bomb,' but you don't make weapons. What did you waste the name on this time?"
"...a custom ARM processor. I'll show myself out."
“Athena, it’s a data lake querying service.”
“Named after the Greek Goddess of spending money on cloud services. Apt.”
“Redshift.”
“I don’t understand why you keep giving Larry attention. If you ignore him he’ll go away.”
“You haven’t.”
“Hey, which one of us is supposed to be the funny one?!”
“The AWS status page.”
“Is it accurate?”
“…sometimes.”
“I’d call it ‘Gaslight’ personally.”
“We took your advice and won’t launch AWS Horse.”
“THANK YOU. What are you calling it instead?”
“AWS Glue.”
“AWS Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes.”
“…do you people get paid by the syllable?”
“All right, what’s next?”
“It’s a database that hates its users, is criminally expensive, and has no recognized exodus strategy.”
“Dear lord. What do you call it?”
“Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse.”
“AWS Ground Station. It listens to signals from satellites as they pass overhead.”
“Are you f*cking with me?”
“Oddly enough, ‘AWS We Are Not F*cking With You’ was the runner-up.”
“This next one is called Cloud—“
“Absolutely not. Fifteen services and forty companies have diluted CloudWhatever to a confusing mess. Pick something else.”
“AWS Elastic—“
“UNDERPANTS!”
“…that’s better than what I was going to say. Damn.”
“AWS Systems Manager El—HOW ARE YOU EMPOWERED TO FIRE ME?!”
“It turns out not everyone reads a SOW thoroughly before signing it. Your personal belongings will be mailed to you.”
“So you launched five services under the ‘Elemental’ brand?”
“Acquisition; we had to keep the name.”
“But you couldn’t name the sub-services ‘Earth,’ ‘Air,’ ‘Fire,’ ‘Water,’ and—shot in the dark—‘Cloud?’”
“WHERE WERE YOU TWO YEARS AGO?!”
“Amazon MQ.”
“Great, another message service that isn’t SQS, SNS, Kinesis, SWF…”
“It’s a bad name. Got it.”
“…CloudWatch Event Bus, Managed Kafka…”
“Please stop.”
“IAM.”
“Like the dog food?”
“Ostensibly with fewer hooves.”
“Yeah, AWS Horse casts a long shadow.”
“We’re thinking of renaming the ‘EC2 Container Service’ to simply be ‘Elastic Container Service.’”
“Ah, because the first name suggested a lack of creativity and vision…”
“That’s right!”
“…and you wanted to outright proclaim rather than suggest that.”
“Device Farm.”
“The service sounds ludicrous but the name is spot on. Gold star for you.”
“Aurora.”
“While I’m thrilled you didn’t use the words ‘Cloud,’ ‘Elastic,’ or ‘Systems Manager,’ I do wonder if ‘Disney Princesses’ is really the next frontier of Amazonian naming conventions…”
“CloudFront.”
“Godot, as in ‘waiting for.’”
“That’s a bit mean.”
“Consistently update distributions on the other side of the planet faster than an ICBM can get there from here, then come back and talk to me.”
“Elastic Beanstalk.”
“Other than share an acronym with the Elastic Block Store to confuse people, what does it do?”
“Destroys customers as soon as they deviate from our prescribed path.”
“Try AWS Luge Track instead.”
“‘Simple Storage Service,’ or ‘S3.’”
“Isn’t it completely Serverless?”
“S4 it is!”
“‘LightSail’ is our simplification if EC2.”
“So you’ve taken something designed to make people’s lives easier and made it completely impossible to discover?! What was your previous job?”
“Voter suppression, mostly.”
“DynamoDB.”
“That’s a crap name.”
“Our closest competitor is called ‘Mongo.’”
“‘DynamoDB’ it is!”
“API Gateway.”
“That’s descriptive, concise, and catchy. I like it!”
“You won’t when you hear our in-house pronunciation of ‘API.’”
“Amazon Workmail?”
“Do you use it at AWS?”
“Good lord no; it’s terrible.”
“In that case, it doesn’t matter what you call it.”
“Cloud9?”
“That’s catchy! Who came up with that one?”
“…it was already named that when we acquired them.”
“Lumberyard.”
“Are you messing with me? That’s a thing?”
“It’s a game engine. Don’t you play computer games?”
“Just Twitter.”
“AWS Firewall Manager?”
“I see you’re a dog-friendly office. What’s your pup’s name, ‘AWS Dog?’”
“…yes.”
“Amazon Macie.”
“That thing that’s extortionately expensive at scale? Make a deal with you; the version people can afford has to be called ‘Amazon Macie’s Basement.’”
“‘AWS Shield.’ It protects against DDoS attacks.”
“I’ve survived those. Works for me. They’re scary enough I’d also accept ‘AWS Diaper.’”
"CodeDeploy."
"Found the optimist. Try 'Code Try To Deploy, Tests Fail, Force Tests to Pass, Tests Still Fail, Scream in Frustration, Subvert Corporate Process, Have Meeting with HR.'"
"That's way too long of a name."
"Go talk to the Kubernetes team."
"Fair point."

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Corey Quinn

Corey Quinn Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @QuinnyPig

Feb 18
Thank you for subscribing to this thread of Amazon #SpheresFacts!
There are over 40,000 plants inside the Amazon Spheres, three quarters of which can run containers in some form or another.
The first plant in the Amazon Spheres was an Australian Tree Fern from the UW Botany greenhouse.

At any company but Amazon it would have been named "the OW Botany Greenhouse Tree Fern" instead, but their names are always peculiar.
Read 10 tweets
Feb 16
In today's episode of "ways Amazon is attempting to scam customers," the default option for a book purchase I was attempting to make is apparently to instead rent it. Caught it in time to cancel the order.

This is increasingly a company whose best days are behind it.
I miss the days when the bookstore part of Amazon was focused on adding value to the customer instead of literal rent-seeking.

"Triple check that you're buying what you THINK you're buying" was never something I had to concern myself with.
Note that the buyout price that they emailed me was significantly more than the price to purchase outright.

As a customer, how do you imagine I feel looking at this? Do you believe this earns trust? Do you think I'm likely to spend MORE with Amazon now?
Read 6 tweets
Feb 15
With zero commentary on the technology itself, in this thread I’m going to bring web3 culture to @awscloud concepts.
Every API call you make becomes a chargeable transaction.
Every time you mention a few key terms you'll get @AWSSupport lookalikes replying instantly with sketchy Google Doc forms claiming to be the support portal and demanding your credentials. Twitter will do nothing about this.
Read 13 tweets
Feb 10
I've been told that since enough has changed in how I do podcasts / video work, I should do another thread about my A/V setup (equipment and software) here at home.

Let's start with the audio path.
This is an ElectroVoice RE20 mic with a pop filter and a shock mount on it. I've been using it for a while; it's on a Røde mounting arm. Image
It plugs into the Cloudlifter mounted to the underside of the desk. Exciting. No buttons, so out of sight, out of mind. Image
Read 19 tweets
Feb 9
I see @awscloud decided to just throw an axe into my week by redoing the billing console. I tentatively approve. shitposting.pictures/7wsXS7r3UOhC2
Ooh, I can retitle it. Yes, this is real, not me having fun with the browser developer tools. Image
I use this account as my AWS credit dump; I'd prefer the opportunity to tell these things to ignore credits and tell me what it'd be costing me in actual dollars if we disregard the company scrip. Image
Read 10 tweets
Feb 8
Let's build something new: a screenshot repo with a custom domain. Datastore is S3, DNS is CloudFlare. Eeny meeny miney Pulumi. @PulumiCorp, you're up.
They have a handy "S3 static site" tutorial option. It's in JavaScript, with a link to the Python code. Nice!

The first command errors. Less than nice.

(It wants `pulumi new` first).
They offer sample code on GitHub. This is why I have @cassido's keyboard handy.
Read 29 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

:(