[HN Gopher] AWS S3? Cloudflare R2? We think we know what's comin...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       AWS S3? Cloudflare R2? We think we know what's coming next
        
       Author : cloudfalcon
       Score  : 285 points
       Date   : 2021-10-07 16:18 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (object-storage-name-generator.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (object-storage-name-generator.com)
        
       | davidkuennen wrote:
       | That's why I like Google Cloud naming. Compute Engine, Cloud SQL,
       | Cloud Build, Kubernetes, ...
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | albatross13 wrote:
       | Q1 baby.
        
       | gzer0 wrote:
       | Interesting!                   var o=r.__SECRET_INTERNALS_DO_NOT_
       | USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED.ReactCurrentOwner,u=Object.prototype.has
       | OwnProperty
       | 
       | Side note: I must say, Taloflow really knows how to capitalize on
       | that HN traffic flow. :)
        
       | tdeck wrote:
       | Sometimes this goes from R2 to Q1 (makes sense), but sometimes it
       | goes to H1. Is there an alphabet that puts H right before R?
        
         | austinpena wrote:
         | Fixed, added a thank you for you in the console!
        
       | kwakja wrote:
       | Reminds me of HAL Laboratory (videogame developer involved with
       | the original Super Smash Bros. and its sequel, Super Smash Bros.
       | Melee) who did the same thing except with IBM.
        
         | patrickthebold wrote:
         | Was that before or after HAL in 2001 space odyssey?
        
           | p_l wrote:
           | Definitely later :D
        
       | clessg wrote:
       | This is almost as fun as Cookie Clicker!
        
       | m0th87 wrote:
       | R2 is marketed as "one less than S3!"
       | 
       | I used the exact same tagline for a project open sourced in 2019:
       | https://github.com/pachyderm/s2/
       | 
       | So there you go VCs, I can market as well as cloudflare. Money
       | please!
        
       | arthurcolle wrote:
       | The negative numbers take away from this bigly
        
         | austinpena wrote:
         | What would you suggest? After 0 go back to 2,147,483,647?
        
       | cmenge wrote:
       | Things get really confusing when you also use SAP R/3, migrating
       | it to S/4: "So the S/4 gets some of its data from R/3 via S3 and
       | writes reports to R2 which are used for a consolidated view in
       | R/3 as long as the analysis isn't migrated to S/4 which will get
       | all data via S3."
        
         | alanbernstein wrote:
         | This is all happening in Q4 at https://www.q2.com/, of course.
        
         | jedberg wrote:
         | "Excuse me, sir. Seeing as how the V.P. is such a V.I.P.,
         | shouldn't we keep the P.C. on the Q.T.? 'Cause if it leaks to
         | the V.C. he could end up M.I.A., and then we'd all be put out
         | in K.P."
        
           | inopinatus wrote:
           | R.I.P.
        
           | orliesaurus wrote:
           | W.T.F. ...
        
           | memco wrote:
           | Every time I hear an abundance of acronyms it makes think of
           | this scene from Rocketman: https://youtu.be/ndj_dS4jImA?t=217
        
             | ajdude wrote:
             | After checking out the link, I went to view the comments
             | but I accidentally opened up another HN thread. I thought
             | that I was reading satire based on this link, until I
             | realized it was a whole set of different acronyms for a
             | different article in AI:
             | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28790100
             | 
             | It took me a couple comments before that realization
             | though.
        
           | xaerise wrote:
           | U.S.A. The land of acronyms...
        
             | Dyac wrote:
             | Initialisms.
        
               | kelnos wrote:
               | Initialisms are a subset of acronyms; acronym is accurate
               | here.
        
               | Jedd wrote:
               | > Initialisms are a subset of acronyms; acronym is
               | accurate here.
               | 
               | I believe you have that inverted.
               | 
               | An abbreviation is a shortened version of a word or
               | phrase, and encompasses both initialisms and acronyms. An
               | initialism is pronounced one letter at a time.
               | 
               | Acronyms are a separate special case - an abbreviation
               | that is pronounceable as a word unto itself.
        
             | moooo99 wrote:
             | Trust me, it's not only the U.S.
             | 
             | Source: I'm from Germany
        
               | dmitriid wrote:
               | y'all have nothing on USSR and Russia.
               | 
               | There's even a small Twitter trend of posting "when you
               | need English to navigate in Moscow". Se. e.g. https://dem
               | otos.ru/sites/default/files/caricatures/2019-10-3...
        
       | omarhaneef wrote:
       | That's one direction to take the series. OR S3 needs to add P0,
       | and R2 needs to add D2. Can't wait till AZ16, invests in Z-16,
       | and releases their S1.
        
       | divbzero wrote:
       | You can do this with HAL too:                 IBM       HAL
       | GZK       FYJ       EXI       DWH       CVG       BUF       ATE
       | ...
        
       | ape4 wrote:
       | Some company is going to break the mold with "Company Name Object
       | Store"
        
         | xtracto wrote:
         | That would have to be Oracle:
         | https://www.oracle.com/mx/cloud/storage/object-storage.html
        
           | mrweasel wrote:
           | Points for linking to the Mexican version.
        
       | politician wrote:
       | Does it bother anyone else that the distance between S3 and R2 is
       | sqrt(2), not 1?
        
       | kalleboo wrote:
       | I would just like to give some respect to Backblaze B2 in here!
        
         | Eikon wrote:
         | B2 is nice but horrendously slow.
        
           | xtracto wrote:
           | A couple of months ago I was playing with BackBlaze and
           | Oracle cloud. For some reason, mounting a Backblaze storage
           | (using FUSE S3 and BB S3 compatibility ) in Oracle cloud was
           | terribly slow. When I tried exactly the same in an AWS EC2
           | instance it was quite fast. No idea why that happened.
        
       | javierga wrote:
       | Clicked before reading title, pressed button like mad. I
       | originally thought it was one of those Elon Musk random child
       | name generators.
        
       | todd3834 wrote:
       | What I like about the name R2 is the statement that they are
       | aiming to make something better than S3. These are the kinds of
       | competitions that benefit the consumers a ton. I don't care who
       | wins as long as things continue to get better.
        
       | dragontamer wrote:
       | And the successor to the programming language "S" was "R". And C
       | became... C++? D? Rust?
        
       | dmix wrote:
       | This is some great content marketing by Taloflow.
       | 
       | Having not paid attention to this story I didn't realize they
       | chose R because it was one letter behind S in the alphabet.
       | 
       | If Cloudflare was a smaller company they'd probably get sued
       | pretty fast. That has happened for much sillier and vain reasons.
       | But I doubt there's much to gain via the courts in the current
       | state of things. This seems to be standard price competition that
       | all commodity like products resort to.
        
         | forgot_old_user wrote:
         | History rhymes with itself?
         | 
         | "Amazon Web Services reportedly named its cloud database
         | RedShift in order to tweak Oracle"
         | 
         | "RedShift was apparently named very deliberately as a nod to
         | Oracle' trademark red branding"
         | 
         | https://www.geekwire.com/2018/amazon-web-services-reportedly...
        
         | floatingatoll wrote:
         | If consumers are so likely to confuse "S3" and "R2" that a
         | court would grant trademark enforcement to S3 over this, then
         | Mazda could have successfully sued BMW over the confusion
         | between MX-2 and M3, not to mention the total havoc such a
         | court judgment would wreak upon the SMT labeling industry:
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28777350
         | 
         | If Cloudflare had an entire AWS-simulation business and was
         | making a clear effort to confuse customers about being "just
         | like AWS, only not Amazon", then that might be an easier case
         | to win, but Cloudflare seems pretty dead-set on being different
         | than AWS (for example, they offer customer support), so that's
         | unlikely.
         | 
         | Amazon might still sue just as saber-rattling, but that would
         | open them up to a SLAPP countersuit, against a party that has
         | repeatedly demonstrated that it is willing to fund lawyers to
         | punish those abusing the legal system -- not to mention being
         | mocked around the world for suing over a two character product
         | name with no shared characters.
        
           | dotancohen wrote:
           | > Cloudflare seems pretty dead-set on being different       >
           | than AWS (for example, they offer customer support
           | 
           | In my experience with problems that I have caused in my AWS
           | environments, AWS has excellent support.
        
             | floatingatoll wrote:
             | Lucky you! And I've recently had a bad experience with
             | Cloudflare support, but I'm still making my offhand
             | comment, because recently an AWS sales rep told me that the
             | formal support process for one of their enterprise products
             | is, paraphrased, "post to a discussion forum, and if I'm
             | not on vacation, I'll see it and escalate internally to get
             | you support" in as many words. I actually restated it to
             | them to confirm and they paused noticeably before unhappily
             | saying "Yes, that's correct". So it'll be a while before
             | they earn back my respect in that particular regard -- I
             | may be upset at receiving poor support one time, but it's
             | still better than not even having a ticketing system
             | available from the other.
        
               | dragonwriter wrote:
               | AWS has 24/7 phone/email/chat support on the business and
               | enterprise support plans (with severity-based SLAs) with
               | not only a ticketing system but a case management API,
               | and business hours support on their developer support
               | plan. Your sales rep sounds like they just want to
               | maintain control of the relationship.
        
               | samhw wrote:
               | Yup, I second this. At a past job we needed support for
               | Kafka, and their tech support's advice was so fantastic
               | that it was actually circulated around the company for
               | general reading. We had an entire team of people who were
               | expert in Kafka - including myself - to the point of
               | having given widely viewed talks etc, and we learned a
               | lot from them. I can't rate it highly enough.
               | 
               | That said, it's famous that there's a very big difference
               | between the different tiers of AWS support. When I say
               | 'tier', I just mean in the sense of how far your query
               | gets escalated, though it's possible that only large
               | clients get to be escalated to the very high tiers. (We
               | were worth billions and spent near enough a million a
               | month, so we were at least a t2.large to them.)
        
               | datavirtue wrote:
               | On Azure you can file a ticket and an engineer will be
               | blowing up your phone in short order. That's on the
               | developer plan. The expensive enterprise planes are the
               | exact same support only faster with a guaranteed SLA.
               | 
               | Azure smokes AWS on docs, community, and support. Just my
               | experience...over and over again.
               | 
               | I'm at a huge high profile company where we have
               | dedicated AWS staff. We have a dedicated email address at
               | AWS to reach them. First time I tried to use the email
               | address I got no reply at all. Took a while to figure out
               | it had changed. I had formed my above-stated opinion long
               | before that whilst trying to use various services and
               | referring to their docs and community to navigate all the
               | undocumented and out of date cruft. This is almost a
               | decade now of the same experience.
        
               | outworlder wrote:
               | > Azure smokes AWS on docs, community, and support. Just
               | my experience...over and over again.
               | 
               | Great. If only their tech stack was at the same level.
               | 
               | In terms of support (filing tickets) we can generally get
               | on a call with AWS in a matter of minutes. If there's one
               | thing that's annoying, is the status page. We'll often
               | get notified of outages by our account rep way before
               | there's anything in the status page.
        
               | dvtrn wrote:
               | _If only their tech stack was at the same level._
               | 
               | No joke. Sometimes I appreciate the way Azure has chosen
               | to differentiate itself in terms of developer experience.
               | 
               | Then there are times using it when I want to walk into an
               | ocean.
               | 
               | Interestingly, those times seem to be anytime I have to
               | deal with Application Insights or LogAnalytics. Azure, if
               | anyone working on those two products are reading this,
               | y'all need to go read up on this thing called
               | 'correlation' because the Azure native logging and APM
               | is...
               | 
               |  _whistles_
               | 
               | boy.
               | 
               | It's something. I just love waiting 5-15 minutes just to
               | see a log line, if I even see it at all with how
               | routinely problematic and unstable their logging
               | infrastructure is[1]
               | 
               | [1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-monitor-
               | status/...
               | 
               | (We're already looking to get away from LA though)
        
               | breakingcups wrote:
               | Not my experience. We're waiting for them to sort out a
               | broken Azure AD B2C instance for over a year.
        
               | floatingatoll wrote:
               | B2C sounds a lot like E2C which is close to EC2!
        
           | CRConrad wrote:
           | > then Mazda could have successfully sued BMW over the
           | confusion between MX-2 and M3
           | 
           | Assuming you mean the MX-3 (I can't find any reference to
           | such a thing as a Mazda MX-2), it would hopefully have been
           | the other way around -- BMW suing Mazda, since the M3
           | predates the MX-3 by half a decade:
           | 
           | > _M3 models have been produced for every generation of 3
           | Series since the E30 M3 was introduced in 1986._ --
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_M3
           | 
           | > _The Mazda MX-3[4] is a four-seat coupe manufactured and
           | marketed by Mazda, introduced at the Geneva Auto Show in
           | March 1991[5] and marketed for model years 1992-1998._ --
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazda_MX-3
        
           | marcosdumay wrote:
           | AFAIK, you can describe a product as "just like AWS, only not
           | Amazon" without any problem as long as you are clear enough
           | that it's not Amazon, and that "like" is really "like".
        
           | rmbyrro wrote:
           | I also have nothing to complain about AWS paid support
        
           | jen20 wrote:
           | The MX-3 started production in 1991, the M3 started
           | production in 1986, so if anything BMW would have been suing
           | Mazda in this situation ;-)
        
           | dorianmariefr wrote:
           | AWS has customer support
        
             | sokoloff wrote:
             | Their (paid) Enterprise Support is quite good, in my
             | experience.
        
               | Hamuko wrote:
               | I've also had good experiences with the paid support when
               | a deployment went horribly wrong. However, the support
               | costs real money so it's back to Google for us. Luckily
               | we're running on EKS now so it's probably easier to
               | diagnose without a paid customer support rep than
               | CodeDeploy.
        
         | CobrastanJorji wrote:
         | Wait until you find out why the giant evil computer is named
         | HAL!
        
           | human wrote:
           | Everyone knows it's fom << Heuristic Algorithm >> ;)
        
           | mellavora wrote:
           | Ive Been Meaning to make that comment
        
         | cronix wrote:
         | Judge: What does S3 even stand for?
         | 
         | Amazon: Simple Storage Solutions, sir.
         | 
         | Judge: Ok, and what does R2 stand for?
         | 
         | CF: Uhhh....it's one less than S3, sir.
         | 
         | Judge: Ok, and what does R2D2 stand for?
         | 
         | Lucas: Why am I here?
        
       | Buttons840 wrote:
       | If this trend continues, one day they'll pay me to store my data
       | on their service. Imagine being paid to generate random hashes
       | and store them on the internet. ;)
        
         | dane-pgp wrote:
         | Presumably that's a clever joke about cryptocurrencies. It took
         | me a while to convince myself that the analogy made sense, and
         | I'm not sure how much I appreciate it, but I suppose that slow
         | confirmation times and questionable value are to be expected
         | when dealing with cryptocurrencies.
        
       | soheil wrote:
       | I was really hoping it'd go into unicode characters.
        
       | tyingq wrote:
       | I think they should have rubbed it in with E0 == egress is zero.
        
       | tra3 wrote:
       | I like how the progress bars moves off screen if you get too
       | excited with the button. Point made :)
        
         | blensor wrote:
         | Anybody know the logic behind the counter? It sometimes jumps
         | over numbers.
        
           | austinpena wrote:
           | All of them increase the score by 1 except:
           | 
           | Free Storage!!!!
           | 
           | That increases by 10. I took out the "You Gave Away Too Much
           | Free Storage" which was a -20 :P
        
       | mdtancsa wrote:
       | With every Click, I heard "Jack Barker's" voice from Silicon
       | Valley
        
       | partiallypro wrote:
       | Meanwhile Microsoft is just like...let's called it "Blob"
        
         | Hamuko wrote:
         | Are you sure it's not Microsoft Azure Blob Storage Solution for
         | Enterprise 2020?
        
           | CobrastanJorji wrote:
           | Did you mean the NFS one or the S3 one?
        
           | iosjunkie wrote:
           | You're missing a 365 in there.
        
             | MikusR wrote:
             | Live .net
        
         | ethbr0 wrote:
         | They'd already used Bob.
         | 
         | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob
        
         | dbt00 wrote:
         | I'll never not link this video when it comes to Microsoft
         | naming and branding:
         | 
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k
        
           | elefanten wrote:
           | That was fun and a good throwback.
           | 
           | But it was interesting to see in the comments that MS
           | actually claimed credit for it:
           | 
           | "It was an internal-only video clip commissioned by our
           | packaging [team] to humorously highlight the challenges we
           | have faced RE: packaging and to educate marketers here about
           | the pitfalls of packaging/branding"
        
         | boynamedsue wrote:
         | It's even worse than that because Azure has block blobs, page
         | blobs, and append blobs.
        
         | Joker_vD wrote:
         | "Xbox One X Series X Service Pack 1 September Refresh CTP
         | Preview 3 Update 5a*. I mean, imma buy it, but lord MSFT sucks
         | at naming stuff" [0]
         | 
         | "I once worked on the unambiguously named "Microsoft Visual
         | Studio .NET Tools For Microsoft Office .NET System 2005". Yes,
         | it had "Microsoft" and ".NET" in the name twice. When the name
         | was announced we all laughed as we assumed it was a joke. It
         | was not." [1]
         | 
         | [0] https://nitter.net/shanselman/status/1205355248715358215
         | 
         | [1] https://nitter.net/ericlippert/status/1205372172534874112
        
           | pjc50 wrote:
           | The whole thing is like german agglutinative nouns. Bits of
           | product keep piling up, but each one has the most generic
           | possible name. But the least forgivable one has to be the
           | XBox One X. I hadn't even realised there was an XBox One X
           | Series X.
        
             | theandrewbailey wrote:
             | Me neither. I thought it was Xbox Series X, not to be
             | confused with the Xbox Series S.
             | 
             | https://www.xbox.com/en-US/consoles/xbox-series-x
             | 
             | https://www.xbox.com/en-US/consoles/xbox-series-s
        
           | jmkni wrote:
           | _Microsoft Visual Studio .NET Tools For Microsoft Office .NET
           | System 2005_ was pretty great at the time, being able to
           | automate Excel in C# and not have to use VBA was very nice.
        
         | andybak wrote:
         | Microsoft Blob. That has a certain ring to it.
        
           | alvarlagerlof wrote:
           | Blob blob blob!
           | 
           | Sorry, what's that Dory?
        
           | qudat wrote:
           | Microsoft Loblaw law blog
        
       | schemathings wrote:
       | Well logically it's P1 next, right? An AI that takes over the
       | world?
       | https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1414021.The_Adolescence_...
        
         | mburns wrote:
         | The letter before R is Q.
        
       | Banjo911 wrote:
       | I need your fedora, your sandals, and your segway.
        
       | ryaan_anthony wrote:
       | Is this the new cookie clicker?
        
       | dingosity wrote:
       | SUCH SYNERGY! SO PARADIGM!
        
       | CodeWriter23 wrote:
       | Though funny (kinda hilarious at A-41 actually) this applet
       | misses the point that R2 was chosen because CloudFlare was
       | undercutting Amazon in every was possible, including the product
       | name.
        
       | bethecloud wrote:
       | Decentralized Cloud Storage services, like Storj DCS - are really
       | interesting when compared to R2/S3. They are compatible with AWS
       | S3, but with better economics than both R2 and S3 (1/10 price of
       | amazon) - https://docs.storj.io/dcs/getting-started/quickstart-
       | aws-sdk...
        
         | alvarlagerlof wrote:
         | Is it worth it to host some disks for this?
        
           | bethecloud wrote:
           | Yeah, as long as you have good uptime. Check out
           | storj.io/node
        
       | Shtirlic wrote:
       | Azure P1 ?
        
       | edoceo wrote:
       | O(1)?
       | 
       | Edit: the site didn't make it, I just think the stylized name was
       | cool.
       | 
       | O for Object and (1) cause it's fast.
       | 
       | Or it would be. I'm not building it.
        
         | encryptluks2 wrote:
         | Q1
        
           | infogulch wrote:
           | P0
           | 
           | O-1, On1?
        
             | dotancohen wrote:
             | I believe that the Japanese had an airplane with that
             | designation once, famous for use in suicide attacks, but I
             | cannot find reference to it. Some other models with Zero in
             | the name I can find, but not the P-0.
        
               | HPsquared wrote:
               | Apparently the Zero was officially the "Navy Type 0
               | carrier fighter".
               | 
               | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_A6M_Zero
        
           | munk-a wrote:
           | I assume Q1 is just a service called Queen - it excels at
           | everything and looks amazing doing it.
        
         | stayfrosty420 wrote:
         | this is legit a much better name while also being reductio ad
         | absurdum, it also follows the convention (R2 = rapid, reliable,
         | S3= simple storage service, O1 = object)
        
           | HPsquared wrote:
           | "Order one".. nice subliminal messaging.
        
       | etothepii wrote:
       | Wouldn't T4 have been a better name? sure it does create the risk
       | of a U5, but prequels are not usually better. (Unless you love
       | endless discussion about intergalactic politics).
        
         | breakingcups wrote:
         | That's what my NAS is called
        
         | jgrahamc wrote:
         | Three years ago I sat in front of a whiteboard with some folks
         | and we sketched out the future roadmap for Cloudflare Workers.
         | Here's a picture of that whiteboard:
         | https://imgur.com/a/nSnrT15
         | 
         | We went with "R2" because it better reflects the fact that we
         | want it to be S3 minus one thing: egress fees.
        
           | xwdv wrote:
           | Q1 will be R2 minus one thing: storage fees.
        
             | tpetry wrote:
             | P0 has already been built: https://devnull-as-a-
             | service.com/
        
               | dotancohen wrote:
               | I love the filename on their cleanup script "gift to the
               | open source community":
               | 
               | https://devnull-as-a-service.com/one-less-to-go.sh
               | sudo rm -rf $(sudo find / -type f -print0 | shuf -n1 -z)
        
         | smnrchrds wrote:
         | Certainly not in Canada. T4 is the name of employment income
         | tax slip here, similar to W-2 in the US.
        
         | jjk166 wrote:
         | I imagine most people who complain about intergalactic politics
         | in the prequels must have never gotten to the scene in A New
         | Hope where people just sit around and discuss the dissolution
         | of the galactic senate and the political reordering of the
         | galaxy.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2021-10-07 23:00 UTC)