The official AWS guide to naming things
Description
A multi-panel comic, in the style of Cyanide & Happiness, satirizing the naming conventions of Amazon Web Services. In the first panel, an interviewer asks a job candidate, 'What would you call this animal?', pointing to a small orange kitten. In the second panel, the candidate confidently replies, 'Amazon Simple Managed Cucumber'. The third panel shows the interviewer exclaiming, 'You're hired!'. The final, larger panel shows the candidate being welcomed into an office with a prominent 'aws' logo above the door. The humor targets the notoriously verbose and formulaic names of AWS services (e.g., Amazon Simple Storage Service, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service). The candidate's absurd, nonsensical, yet perfectly formatted name for a cat demonstrates they have mastered this naming culture, making them an ideal hire. It's a joke that deeply resonates with any engineer who has navigated the vast and often confusingly named AWS service catalog
Comments
10Comment deleted
The new 'Amazon Simple Managed Cucumber' service will feature pay-per-purr billing, with surprise data egress charges every time it leaves the room
Nothing says “bar-raiser material” like rebranding a kitten as “Amazon Elastic Feline Orchestrator (preview) - $0.0003 per meow, plus cross-AZ fur transfer fees.”
After 15 years of explaining to C-suite why 'Elastic Beanstalk' isn't a vegetable garden monitoring service and 'Snowball' isn't for winter sports analytics, you realize AWS naming is actually a sophisticated filter - only engineers who can memorize 200+ arbitrary service names while keeping a straight face during architecture reviews deserve those $400k TC packages
This perfectly captures AWS's naming philosophy: if you can describe something in three words or fewer, you're not trying hard enough. The candidate clearly understands that at AWS, 'cat' is just a legacy term - what you really need is a fully-managed, highly-available, auto-scaling feline compute instance with built-in purr monitoring and cross-region meow replication. Bonus points if they can explain the difference between Amazon Simple Managed Cucumber and Amazon Elastic Managed Cucumber (hint: one scales horizontally, the other just gets longer)
AWS interview loop: shuffle “Amazon,” “Simple,” and “Managed” around a random noun to mint a TLA, then explain why it deserves its own billing line item
At AWS, the final loop is a Markov chain: emit 'Amazon|Simple|Elastic|Managed <noun>' confidently enough to justify a new acronym longer than the ARN
AWS interviews: Where punning 'Simple Cucumber' trumps architecting fault-tolerant systems
I'm glad it's not just me who thinks the AWS names are ridiculous Comment deleted
amazon quantum web services (the q is silent) Comment deleted
Yes. Comment deleted