What do AWS services actually do?

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com

I love this:

Data Pipeline
Should have been called
Amazon ETL

Glacier
Should have been called
Really slow Amazon S3

Kinesis
Should have been called
Amazon High Throughput
It’s like
Kafka

I have used this but I did not know the name:

Snowball
Should have been called
AWS Big Old Portable Storage Use this to
Get a bunch of hard drives you can attach to your network to make getting large amounts (Terabytes of Data) into and out of AWS It’s like
Shipping a Network Attached Storage device to AWS

These are useful names that actually describe what these services do?

CloudWatch
Should have been called
Amazon Status Pager Use this to
Get alerts about AWS services messing up or disconnecting. It’s like
PagerDuty, Statuspage

Config
Should have been called
Amazon Configuration Management Use this to
Keep from going insane if you have a large AWS setup and changes are happening that you want to track.

OpsWorks
Should have been called

Amazon Chef Use this to
Handle running your application with things like auto-scaling.

Trusted Advisor
Should have been called

Amazon Pennypincher Use this to
Find out where you’re paying too much in your AWS setup (unused EC2 instances, etc.).

What I’m curious about is why, when I go to Amazon and investigate these service, I’m unable to find this kind of simple explanation of what a service actually does.

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