Amazon Web Services in Plain English

Re:Amazon Web Services in Plain English by iandanforth on Saturday November 17, 2018 @03:01PM (#18477076)

You can tell the age/mentality of the person who wrote some of these names as they match very closely with my mental models. An "FTP Server" is inaccurate, but perfectly descriptive for me. Scripts is the same thing, "a small program which gets run repeatedly for a very specific task." So I think this is more of a guide for a 30-40 something dev who hasn't bothered to keep up with the proliferation of services.

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Re:Amazon Web Services in Plain English by social_quotient on Sunday November 18, 2018 @05:57AM (#18479784)

I agree with you and to add. I think of FTP used in describing s3 is kinda like Coke being used to describe all cola based soft drinks. FTP here is a generic descriptor for transferring files, The protocols part is unimportant as is the difference between Coke and Pepsi when you said I’d like a coke.

All of the descriptors used for the Aws stack had a similar ring to them with an intended audience of someone a little older and with a little, or more, legacy knowledge about tech. Oddly I could see this useful for two use cases.

1- explaining something to my mom, now over 60 and no longer in the know with regard to tech. Might remember what ftp is or collocation is 2- explaining to an older very siloed technical person, I’m thinking enterprise/gov networking in a place where they don’t get exposure to newer cloud stack stuff. (Banking, healthcare, FEMA)

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Re:Amazon Web Services in Plain English by rpedela on Sunday November 18, 2018 @11:22AM (#18481056)

I'm in that 30-40 range and been programming 20 of that. I definitely would shy away from anything with FTP in the name because of the protocol's historical problems even if that wasn't a fair assumption for the service. Not having FTP in the name was a good decision by Amazon in my opinion. Now is S3 a good name? I don't know.

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Re:Amazon Web Services in Plain English by WhyNotHugo on Saturday November 17, 2018 @10:38PM (#18478753)

Whenever I read FTP, I assume very legacy, very insecure protocols.

Mostly because FTP has been considered insecure and kinda deprecated since 1999, and we've had better things (eg: SFTP) since.

So, for somebody in their fourties it might be a better name, but for somebody younger, it's definitely misleading.

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Re:Amazon Web Services in Plain English by sam0x17 on Sunday November 18, 2018 @12:57AM (#18479063)

yeah but starting around 2005 if you said "ftp server" it was implied that you would still use encryption via sftp or ftps. Few people will actually spell out sftp server.

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Re:Amazon Web Services in Plain English by eksemplar on Sunday November 18, 2018 @02:38AM (#18479297)

Sftp servers are still the backbone in a lot of datatransfers.

Apparently APIs are really hard for most companies.

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