Thread by @QuinnyPig

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."