I think it's because naming things is hard, that link proves it by coming up with worse names for almost everything they tried to rename, and often far, far worse.
Imagine the confusion if S3 were called "Amazon Unlimited FTP Server." That gets every word wrong, except that "Amazon" is merely redundant. It's not unlimited (having to pay for a thing is a limit), it's not using FTP, and it's a service, not a server.
Or if VPC was "Amazon Virtual Colocated Rack". A "colocated rack" means your computer in their datacenter. They actually have this service, it's called Direct Connect, because you can actually
Lambda does require you've got some vague notion of what lambda notation is. But "AWS App Scripts" suggests it's for mobile "apps", but it is not specific to those. And it suggests it's only for scripts, but you can run an entire application on Lambda just fine.
Or even DynamoDB. They recommend "Amazon NoSQL." They're not offering many NoSQL databases, just their proprietary one: DynamoDB. They have a service that offers many relational databases and that is called Relational Database Service.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has been trying really hard to make sure things are named in as straightforward a way as possible. It was a very early decision pre-launch, and unsurprisingly not that hard to stick to. Marketing people didn't argue, either, but maybe that's a difference between the marketing team backgrounds? Enterprise company CIOs etc. don't want to have a translation guide when it comes to making purchasing decisions.
Some of the "WTF, how did they come up with that name" with AWS comes entirely down to the public name being the internal project name, e.g. Snowball. Various engineers and managers have facepalmed hard when marketing decided to go with the easiest option and use that name rather than come up with something meaningful.
And then I’m stuck with the 4th (?) place cloud provider with a horrible reputation. Choosing Oracle definitely would violate the CYA rule - “No one ever got fired for choosing $what_everyone_else_chooses”. I would be safer choosing Azure or even GCP.
Er, I'd argue that aiming for safety and/or following the crowd aren't really the ingredients of a sound decision making process. On that basis no challenger would ever stand a chance.
That’s not my problem. Everyone looks out for their own self interest. Let’s say that OCI and AWS both statistically had the same uptime. If AWS went down for a day no one is going to question you as CTO for choosing AWS, besides you’re in the same boat as everyone else. If Oracle Cloud went down, everyone is going to be questioning your decision.
But, the saying initially was about IBM. The CTOs in the 60s and 70s who chose IBM instead of one of their competitors in hindsight made a good decision. You can still buy hardware from IBM today that can run COBOL programs written thirty to forty years ago. All of IBMs competitors are long dead.
From a recruitment standpoint, you can easily find someone who knows or wants to learn AWS or Azure - Oracle Cloud - not so much.
Like when you think about if a startup had to sell people on a single one of these services, they would have to actually say "like an unlimited FTP server BUT" and thats the only way they could get into board rooms and they would spend years on just that wrong and skeuomorphic branding just to get off the ground
Whereas Amazon doesn't have to do that, and doesn't have to explain the skeumorphic stuff to anyone, they'll just mention it in some conferences about what you can do now, the end.
Yeah, thats really cool. It doesn't mean there isn't a better way, but I can see how it isn't as arbitrary as I thought.
Services like S3 are referred to as „object storage“. AWS Lambda is a service for „serverless compute“ or „function as a service“ (although it‘s debatable if these are good names for the concept).
My point is that definitely are named for these concepts but AWS uses brand names which is quite confusing for people who are new to AWS.
Why? They could have simply named them with AWS Serverless, or AWS Compute, or whatever.
Using these brand names might make it easier to evolve them later, or they really wanted nice sounding names because eventually you'd have to write out long phrases with the AWS prefix, and that's probably harder to market.
Kubernetes Engine, Compute, Storage, Memory Store, Cloud SQL, PubSub.... almost all of the main services do what they say on the tin.
The only downside is - ironically - it sometimes makes googling for help a bit tricker. Eg. Are you search for generic cloud storage or the Google product with the same name?
Why is lemon sugar flavored carbonated beverage called Mountain Dew? Shouldn't the soda companies use less convoluted language?
Why is Confluent not just called Kafka+? Why isn't Kafka called LinkedIn distributed subscriber service?
I think "codenames" are easier to reference and discuss once you get immersed in the ecosystem. "lambda" vs. "serverless compute" - which one do you want to say 30 times a day?
How long has the idea of “ubiquitous language” when talking about a business domain been around?
Everyone technical at my company from the CTO down can have conversations and talk about CloudFront, API Gateway, Lambda, S3,SQS,SNS,DynamoDB, Aurora, Fargate, CodeBuild, CodePipeline, CloudFormation, IAM, WAF, EC2, ECS,ECR, Cognito, etc.
I’ve seen developers come in and within 3 months it’s second nature.
I know the ins and outs of AWS pretty well, but when I see discussions about Azure or GCP, I’m completely lost. It’s not like I’m a stranger to the development side of the Microsoft ecosystem. I’ve been developing in C# for over decade and have used Visual Studio since 1997.
Probably because parallelization is not the end-all-be-all of management strategies.
Consumers expect most companies to act like a coherent unit, (purportedly due to Dunbar's Number), and when you don't have enough oversight or leadership everything begins to look schizophrenic.
"Self-organizing" is organized chaos. If nobody picks winners at the end it never stops being organized chaos.
This is the exact reason I prefer Azure. I can use the search textbox to find something and the name is usually pretty explanatory (but they do have some daft stuff, like 3 different queue offerings with pretty vague documentation on the differences).
To add: It might actually help with commercial sales - the obfuscation makes it seem like there is more to each product than it being a cloud-managed version of what is done locally.
This is typical in finance. Many of the financial "instruments" are given funny nouns that hide the true character of what they are (usually shitty loans, or stocks being sold at a mark-up).
>Why does AWS use such convoluted language? Is it because they're dominant and it adds friction to moving to another provider?
Having gone from AWS in my last role to GCP in my current, I can tell you with 100% certainty that for me, AWS' mnemonic device naming convention is far, FAR more effective in helping me remember which service does what.
S3? Storage. EC2? VM/compute. GCP's equivalent? GCS/GCE. I don't do a whole lot with VMs in my role but it takes me a few good seconds to remember "GCE" whereas EC2 is instantly memorable. Don't get me started on Google's many "Data X" services (Datastore, Dataproc, Data Transfer, Data Catalog, Data Fusion, Dataprep, Data Labeling).
tl,dr; the lizard part of my brain very much prefers AWS' naming style, and I have a hard time remembering GCP's services despite the descriptive naming.
I think that AWS offers more distinctive names, which helps experienced users a lot. EC2 is instantly recognisable as meaning Amazon's compute service, S3 is storage. GCE and GCS could stand for all sorts, Google brings up "General Certificate of Education" and "Glasgow Coma Scale" as the first results.
I suppose because of this, Google tend to use the full name in most of their documentation. It does make learning how to use Google Cloud as a beginner a lot easier though.
Why does AWS use such convoluted language? Is it because they're dominant and it adds friction to moving to another provider?