Oh hell I have spent the last decade working with AWS and I still have no idea what any of the icons are. They are all complete shit. Literally the worst.
To be fair I can't remember half the product names other than the core ones either. Elastic Banana or whatever. Maybe Dynamo Donkey. I just don't know any more.
Edit: I'm also an AWS Architect Professional or whatever it's called now. Shows how a monkey can pass the certs eh?
3/20 and two correct ones were guesses here; I was actually wondering what's wrong with me, asking "Dude, have you ever even seen the AWS console at this point?" (I have in fact stared at it way too much). Goes to show a lot of these icons just aren't very distinctive and don't seem to matter much.
Worth noting that also from experience that applies to the amount of effort they put into services. Most of the non-core ancillary services are buggy garbage. I'm wondering if we're going to cause an integer overflow on the support ticket system the way we're going.
To be fair, the majority of professional interaction with AWS should be via text interfaces - infrastructure as code, SDKs, commandline - where icons don't matter.
The names aren't often all that much better, of course
If you pass this, a team of medical professionals will be sent to your home to peacefully euthanize you, as it is the only ethical choice to end your suffering.
Kind of. It's only supported via an embedded Lambda code block written in a version of NodeJS that will expire in about two months.
Also, please exercise caution with your targets file. We have had a few customers complain that it's easy to mix up your targets list with a customer database dump in S3, in which case it will alphabetically and systematically begin killing them off. This is particularly bad as there's a delay before each transaction hits the AWS billing API, which may result in unusually high costs for the month and/or delays until your bill warning alerts fire.
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It makes me wonder too how many of these actually _are_ the "it's like". For example, I know that Elasticache actually is redis or memcached... makes me wonder if Kinesis isn't actually Kafka rebranded.
It's not. Kinesis was around before Kafka became the de-facto tool for data streaming. AWS has a separate managed Kafka service called MSK, which came much later.
I guess the point is not that other companies also have products with unrelated names, but if you happen to be familiar with Y then saying "Amazon x is just Amazon's version of Y" is very succinct.
Same. Though, I forget what it is since I heard about it. Now I think it's funny that it could refer to either cruel bureaucracy or turning into a bug.
Most of these are really funny, but I feel like they should have just left out the reasonable ones. There's enough of them that it kind of kills the humor after a certain amount of "actually this one is fine" imo.
For people despairing about their ability to score on this quiz asking such simple things as what color is the S3 icon. The quiz is using the Cloud Formation Designer icons not the ones you see every day in the console or in the icon asset pack from the AWS site you might be using in your architecture diagrams. So unless you spend a load of time using that to build your CFTs rejoice you shouldn't be surprised you're getting them wrong since they are not consistent across those locations.
Thank you. While they're familiar, I couldn't figure out where to go to see these cuboid icon variants. Spent a few minutes clicking around the Console and the AWS web site / marketing pages, and didn't encounter a single one. When I think AWS icons, I only know the AWS Console favicons and thumbnails in Console search results.
I was perplexed when it offered ELB as an answer when I've only known ELB to exist within EC2 and share its icon.
I was really confused too going through when I got to "What color is the S3 icon?" I was happy to finally get one and confidently answered green only to be told I was wrong. I even went to check the console and it was green, that's when I started wondering where they were pulling these from and someone else mentioned it.
As a designer, I just want to say that if your instinct is to rag on these symbols for being incomprehensible, go ahead and try your hand at one or two. It may be humbling.
Illustrating abstract concepts that are similar to other, related abstract concepts is extremely difficult. Remember that it's got to be legible in a footprint of a couple dozen pixels on a side. When you're done, make sure it isn't close enough to any other AWS product symbols that customers would get confused. Also, run it by a committee of people who aren't designers, and are proud of that fact. If they are in a senior position, attempt to integrate their feedback, no matter how idiotic, into your design, because nobody's going to fight for a little thing like an icon symbol.
I stopped making logos, it's a really difficult and thankless job. Designing apps for complex use cases is way simpler.
The only reason I can play this game is because "Icons with Labels" is impossible to deal with in the AWS console. I _really_ wish I could just set the labels myself.
"AWS Simple Email Service." Were you worried I would forget it's an AWS service? Or worried that I wouldn't remember it's simple, or a service? Do you offer any other email service? Can I please just rename the label to "SES"?
and then there's "flip a coin" about whether it's "AWS Foo" or "Amazon Foo". I think I once read that Amazon Foos were things that were used internally, too, and AWS Foos were things only sold to pay for rocket fuel and yachts (I kid, I kid; paying for all those Graviton fabs is some serious $$$ too)
You surprised me for a second and I thought you had found an example of where they actually _wrote out_ Amazon Web Services in the title of something and I was going to claim they must get paid by the letter or something, but no, it's just "AWS Systems Manager ..." https://docs.aws.amazon.com/systems-manager/latest/userguide...
I think Microsoft was even better, at least on the number of users that recognized the blue W for making documents the e icon to get online, etc. That's how my mom did it, but she would have no idea what Ps, Il, Ae, would mean
There was only one icon that I could guess from the context. The mobile analytics icon looked like a bar-chart and the other options were things like Kinesis and other services that didn't match the icon.
I have red green color blindness (deuteranopia) and i have no idea if my answer is right or wrong on until i change my monitor settings to high saturation. (I usually turn that off because it messes a lot with other colors)
This was hilarious. Some of descriptions are great. "Dried arterial blood" is a nice vivid color descriptor.
It really puts into context how meaningless these icons are. I log into AWS all the time and did terrible on this quiz (4/20), despite having seen some of these icons hundreds of times at least.
It definitely feels like Amazon had some intern project that generated 'spatial catpchas' (prove you are human by picking the stacked blue boxes) and decided to re-use it for every icon.
I've contributed and/or led development on at least 4 different AWS consoles and have used AWS every day for the last 10 years, with 8 of those working at AWS. Still only got 6 right on the quiz.
That said, AWS is transitioning away from those 3D logos. I just wish they'd transition away from Amazon vs AWS name prefix confusion. I've read the internal notes on why they do that, but the reasoning never clicked for me and I still have no idea without looking it up.
You guys generated complaints from HN users about you spamming HN with booster comments and upvotes. I checked and the complainers were right. Doing this will get you banned here, so please avoid anything of the sort in the future.
Where do these icons come from they don't match what's used in the AWS console at all.
So many of these are weird because I mostly know of their icons from the main console page which apparently doesn't match the ones this quiz is pulling from because it said the S3 icon isn't green and the IAM icon is a key. In the console it's green and an ID with a lock icon on it at least for me.
I think they may be an older AWS icon set. I was just doing making an infrastructure diagram in lucid chart and the S3 icon was red and I recognized it so I got it right, but it doesn't match whats in the console now
The other person has it right. It's the icon set used in Cloudformation Designer. Which doesn't even match their current icon asset packet for Powerpoint, those generally seem to use the ones used in the console from my limited survey.
Ah ok. I've never used designer much at all so the fact they didn't match the AWS console version of things was really confusing. The first question is the 3 overlapping boxes with a play button which is supposedly the lambda icon but the console just has an orange box with a boxy white λ so I was never going to get that.
Wonder if OP could make a version of this that uses the console icons instead of the designer icons..
I don't work with AWS a lot but I thought I could probably score a few points by following their rules for their color coding: orange for compute services, blue for DB related, green for other service management related and red for storage.
I got 6.
Why tf is Route 53 the same colour as compute services?
I got 9/20 and got called a noob - glad I'm not the only one that had a lower than perhaps expected score despite using AWS daily for years and years. Not going to miss those icons though.
much like comment elsewhere in this thread about Adobe's products, I bet one would get pretty far just using the initialisms for the service and then no one has to spend their precious braincells trying to map someone's fever dream icons for Iot-Blockchain-Whatever down to some triangles
GCP has a mix of "that makes sense" (scheduler, run, compute, spanner) to "I can see where they were going" (memorystore, speech) with a smidge of: "that doesn't make any sense/just a fun design that isn't meaningful" (anthos).
Lots of icons are dots or squares that are connected, which of course isn't helpful because that's what nodes in a network actually are in all circumstances.
GCP is (un)fortunately saved by it's relatively low product offering (by AWS's standards at least).
Should they even have any icons? Most of them don't really convey meaning, and there are so many, and many similar (rectangular prisms in different orientations), that it's impossible to remember them.
They need icons so that the utterly incomprehensible architecture diagrams that mostly would convey little useful information even if you recognized the symbols drawn by architects for administrative rather than technical reasons have the façade of a standardized, consistent language.
It's possibly a sign that you are a good engineer. If you are using infrastructure-as-code, whether that is terraform or cloudformation, you are used to looking at a yaml or json file that does not include icons. If you have automated everything to the point that you rarely need to log into the AWS console, you probably don't regularly see these icons.
To be fair I can't remember half the product names other than the core ones either. Elastic Banana or whatever. Maybe Dynamo Donkey. I just don't know any more.
Edit: I'm also an AWS Architect Professional or whatever it's called now. Shows how a monkey can pass the certs eh?