AWS products and services naming nomenclature starting with 'Amazon' vs 'AWS'

Question

Just curious to understand if there are any logical reasoning behind in naming AWS products and services. For example, it has been named as AWS Lambda and not Amazo

Answer 1

Context: Web Service, initially designed as a replacement for Remote Procedure Call (RPC) was a revolutionary idea during the Internet Boom based mainly on XML. Amazon's philosophy was to manage all the ERP and Customer request using IT (Web Services) instead of traditional paper based processes (or RPC or not automated tools). The same approach was then applied from books to compute resources (that's how S3 and EC2 products came to be).

Any service designed to be used by the customer mainly through an API (or Web Service - today it will be called API first product ) it is part AWS collection of services, and when the service is seen as a traditional product (like replacement of a service that you would install on your desktop or use it from Cloud, mainly through an UI) is part of Amazon collection of services. Today we can see exceptions to this rule. Initially this was the thought of Jeff Bezos. To understand more about his philosophy, read: The Secret of Amazon success internal APIs:

Think about what Bezos was asking! Every team within Amazon had to interact using Web Services.

Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired. Thank you; have a nice day!

Answer 2

As far as I understand, the prefix AWS is used for PaaS ( Platform as a Service) and prefix Amazon is used for IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). The term AWS(Amazon Web Service) is used whenever it is offered in terms of service/platform, where as Amazon is used whenever a hardware resource/infrastructure is provided.

For example: In the product page of AWS site, in compute category the Amazon EC2 is IaaS providing compute capacity where as AWS Elastic BeanStalk is PaaS which is a platform for deploying web services and web-apps/wesites, likewise AWS Lambda is PaaS for server-less computing which lets us run code without provisioning or managing servers. Similarly in Storage category Amazon S3 is an IaaS which provides storage capabilities where as AWS Snownball is a petabyte-scale data transport solution that uses secure appliances to transfer large amounts of data into and out of the AWS cloud,which is kind of PaaS.

Although this is just a logical assumption, as we never really know about how Amazon has named it's products and services. So please forgive if there are difference of opinions regarding this.

Answer 3

In one of AWS Meetups it was told that Amazon itself uses few of its cloud services and these are named with 'Amazon' prefix.

I am not sure how much of this is true..

Answer 4

Managed to find an answer on naming analogy for AWS products and services from another similar question posted here. Response provided by a Senior Technical Trainer working at Amazon Web Services.

The pattern is that utility services are prefixed with AWS, while standalone services are prefixed by "Amazon".

Services prefixed with AWS typically use other services, for example:

• AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS OpsWorks and AWS CloudFormation launch other services

• AWS Lambda is triggered by other services

• AWS Data Pipeline moves data between other services

• AWS CloudFormation launches other services

The AWS documentation page is a great reference for determining the official name of a service.