GCP names the obvious, AWS names the indie band’s track list

Description

Split-panel meme. Left side shows two well-known reaction images: top is a calm office portrait with the person’s face blurred, bottom is the frantic Charlie-from-‘It’s Always Sunny’ conspiracy board scene, also blurred. Right side is white text comparing cloud vendors. Section header: "How GCP names stuff" followed by bullet-style lines: "You store stuff in cloud - Cloud storage", "SQL in cloud - Cloud SQL", "Query stuff from big data - BigQuery", "CDN for cloud - CloudCDN", "Stream analytics - DataFlow (cuz data flows in a stream 🏄)", "Run stuff in cloud - Cloud Run", "Functions in cloud - Cloud Function". Below, another header: "How AWS names stuff" with service names scattered in varying font sizes: "Aurora, Amplify, Copilot, Fargate, Route 53, LightSail, Polly, SageMaker (Because you'll quit your job to become a sage after using this), Elastic Beanstalk (because the creators stalk photos of beans on instagram), Glue, Redshift (Because you shift from Oracle whose colour is red), Kinesis, Greengrass (Because green grass was involved when naming this)". The visual joke highlights GCP’s literal naming versus AWS’s eclectic branding. For seasoned engineers juggling multi-cloud diagrams, the contrast pokes fun at the cognitive load and glossary fatigue that come with AWS architectures

Common Tags

AWS Google Cloud NamingConventions DeveloperHumor TechHumor VendorLockIn

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick My architecture reviews now allocate two hours: ten minutes for the diagram, one hour-fifty just to decode which AWS poet named the components

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

My architecture reviews now allocate two hours: ten minutes for the diagram, one hour-fifty just to decode which AWS poet named the components
Anonymous

After 15 years in the industry, I've realized AWS service names are actually a sophisticated form of job security - nobody can replace you if you're the only one who remembers that Elastic Beanstalk isn't a vegetable monitoring service and that Greengrass has nothing to do with sustainable computing
Anonymous

The real reason AWS service names sound like they were generated by a neural network trained on 90s band names and kitchen appliances? It's actually a brilliant retention strategy - by the time you've memorized that 'Elastic Beanstalk' handles application deployment and 'Kinesis' streams data (not the other way around), you're too invested to switch to GCP's boringly logical 'Cloud Run' and 'DataFlow'. It's the tech equivalent of Stockholm syndrome, except your captor is a naming committee that definitely had access to some very creative 'greengrass' during their brainstorming sessions
Anonymous

GCP is grep-able nouns; AWS requires a runbook-backed service registry to resolve marketing DNS - Aurora equals RDS MySQL, Fargate equals ECS tasks - otherwise the incident stalls on human name resolution
Anonymous

GCP: services named like clean READMEs. AWS: like obfuscated minified JS - good luck grepping for that endpoint
Anonymous

Multi‑cloud ADR: GCP speaks Noun‑English, AWS speaks Product‑Marketing - so our runbooks now include a glossary longer than the VPC list just to map Cloud Run ↔ Fargate and DataFlow ↔ Kinesis
@azizhakberdiev 2y

Touch the Greengrass
@deerspangle 2y

I'm convinced AWS purposefully names all their stuff baffling bullshit, and makes a garbage-tier UI so that they can sell training courses, and lock people into their service using sunk cost fallacy
1. @man13hma 2y
  
  Based
2. @Araalith 2y
  
  Oh sweet summer child, I'll wait for your screams of horror and disgust when you see Azure.
  
  @deerspangle 2y
  
  No one uses azure though, haha.. Have had to use that at work a little bit, but not much
  
  @CcxCZ 2y
  
  Goverments. MS lobby traditionally strong there.
  
  @deerspangle 2y
  
  Yeah, we work with banks, and some of them wanna use azure
  
  @ercolebellucci 2y
  
  they dont?
  
  @Eugene1319 2y
  
  Am not sure what you meant, but the Azure interface doesn't look completely bad
3. dev_meme 2y
  
  The names are honestly shit, though the courses are worse cuz the official ones are free and are aimed at kindergarteners (though it's so funny how they try to find reasons AWS is a good choice, like "Yeah, you could set up any load balancer, it's not so difficult but it's just a load balancer so why not use AWS ALB")
  
  @qtsmolcat 2y
  
  It only costs 6x more because reasons™️
  
  dev_meme 2y
  
  Honestly I'm not a fan of all the cloud stuff that doesn't give you complete control of what you rent but life's tough and working on a guy isn't working on yourself.. So my boss only knows that there is AWS and a Mac laptop, the rest is a dark forest for him
  
  @qtsmolcat 2y
  
  We stopped using AWS a long time ago mostly because of it being the most expensive
  
  dev_meme 2y
  
  I mean since I work in outsourcing co and most clients don't want to know the details and just want it cheap, the guy once deleted an entire redis cluster saying "It's too expensive, I'm sure you can find a solution to keep everything in MySQL", after that I spent 10 hours patching a chinese library we used for admin panel, so yeah, AWS if fun (no)
  
  @qtsmolcat 2y
  
  I prefer mariadb but not much beats redis for a caching layer + limited data storage
  
  dev_meme 2y
  
  Yeah me too, though I'm not familiar with redis yet, I just set it up as a dependency
  
  @qtsmolcat 2y
  
  Redis is generally really fast, and it's a key store database, so don't expect to store anything fancy without serializing it first It has optional persistence so it's primarily in memory but not entirely and caches will survive restarts Are you using a framework or nah
dev_meme 2y

So the point I'm trying to make is that there are such individuals that are like "cheap is bad, expensive is good, I like my new mac and that cool stone I have in my cave", not even mentioning complete bullshit enterprises like snowflake, who basically provide you with over-overpriced AWS servers under the hood so AI devs can focus on their AI tasks (hire a devops dammit)
1. @qtsmolcat 2y
  
  Me who does most of my own stuff lmao
  
  dev_meme 2y
  
  Obviously if you like to waste money, there are tons of cheaper clouds, like hetzner, but generally a strong VPS will be enough for most small-mid sized businesses because anyways you'll pay less for unused resources than "pay for what you use" on AWS
  
  @qtsmolcat 2y
  
  We use a mixture of dedicated hardware and cloud hardware from hetzner. US infra is on cloud, Europe is on dedicated
dev_meme 2y

I'm pretty sure you still pay less monthly than a single-project setup at AWS and hetzner is a great option, I run freelance projects there, no complaints from clients and everyone's happy
1. @qtsmolcat 2y
  
  C/S can be a bit slow to respond but we've only needed them like once
@dsmagikswsa 2y

AWS marketing team is another level