Same thing, different name

[serjsk8]

Hello,

Lately I’ve been feeling really tired of all the endless terminology chaos in our industry.
It’s always the same ideas — networks, virtual machines, configs — but every platform has to give them a new shiny name to sound “innovative”.

Kubernetes calls configs "manifests", Azure calls a regular IPsec VPN an "ExpressRoute", AWS has Direct Connect, Google calls it Interconnect, and everyone pretends it’s something revolutionary.
It’s all the same stuff wrapped in different buzzwords.

I just want to build the actual project - deploy the VMs, make the network work, automate it with Terraform and not spend half my time learning new names for old ideas.

Sometimes it feels like engineering became less about building and more about translating vendor language back into plain reality.
At the end of the day, it’s still the same fundamentals: compute, storage, and networking.

Everything else is just noise.

It’s all the same crap, just rebranded by different vendors:

Reality	What Vendors Call It
Regular virtual machine	EC2 Instance (AWS)
	Compute Engine (GCP)
	Virtual Machine (Azure)
	VirtualMachine (KubeVirt)
	Droplet (DigitalOcean)
	Server (Hetzner)
Six names for the same thing: a KVM with a disk and an IP address.

Reality	What Vendors Call It
IPsec VPN	ExpressRoute (Azure)
	Direct Connect (AWS)
	Cloud Interconnect (GCP)
	Cloud Connect (Alibaba)
	PrivateLink (AWS — not even VPN, just proxy )
Everyone sells “private connectivity to the cloud” — it’s just tunnels and BGP underneath.

Reality	What Vendors Call It
YAML/JSON config file	Manifest (Kubernetes, OpenShift)
	Chart (Helm)
	Stack (CloudFormation)
	Blueprint (Azure, Crossplane)
	Module (Terraform)
All text files, just different syntax and marketing.

Reality	What Vendors Call It
Process in a namespace	Pod (Kubernetes)
	Task (ECS)
	App Service (Azure)
	Revision (Knative)
	Instance (Cloud Run)
Under the hood: same runc and cgroups.

Reality	What Vendors Call It
Block storage	EBS Volume (AWS)
	Persistent Disk (GCP)
	Managed Disk (Azure)
	PVC (Kubernetes)
	DataVolume (KubeVirt/CDI)
Still just a virtual disk.

Term	What It Really Means
Serverless	Servers — just not yours
Cloud Native	The same app, now in a container
Operator	A controller with a YAML wrapper
Manifests-as-Code	Configs with a louder name

Sometimes I really wonder what everyone else thinks about this.

Do you also feel that the industry is overcomplicating simple things with endless new terms and abstractions?
Or maybe you actually like how each platform tries to describe the same ideas in its own way?

I’m genuinely curious — not to argue, but to understand how others see it.
Maybe I’m just tired, or maybe a lot of us quietly feel the same.

 

[atax1a]

"serverless" is really just "/cgi-bin but you pay per request". these clown services are sold to make a profit on service that would be dirt cheap, to allude to mr. blankenship's manifesto

 

[W.hâ/t]

Sometimes it feels like engineering became less about building and more about translating vendor language back into plain reality.
At the end of the day, it’s still the same fundamentals: compute, storage, and networking.

It is the same about other stuff. "I don't believe in God, I'm more a spiritual person." It's the same thing, even atheism. If you have to believe, it's a religion.

Everything else is just noise

Agree. When I learn about those terms, I'm like it's just a server that does something specific.

Sometimes I really wonder what everyone else thinks about this.

Progress is an illusion. What is your starting point and what is your end point? Into that, what value system do you use? And who gets to decide what value system to use. You, me? People like to think there's an end goal to life and that they are making the world a better place. The truth, what matters is expressing your true self along whatever path life guides you. Being authentic, that's real.

 

[Maturin]

Lately I’ve been feeling really tired of all the endless terminology chaos in our industry.
It’s always the same ideas — networks, virtual machines, configs — but every platform has to give them a new shiny name to sound “innovative”.

I feel the very same. So, I am sorry to tell you, there are only to ways:
Shoot all morons (I'm not sure this will really help, or work at all), or learn to live with it.

It's even worse than just having several names for the same thing, only.
Not seldom you will stumble over terminologies that are simply completely wrong, actually abused, used for something completely else, sometimes even contradicting.
And not to make things sound more innovative, but just because they sound less boring, more sentantious than the correct term.
At university everybody learns: there are terminolgies to be used correctly for very good reasons. But there are many who forget almost everything they learned at U when they graduate instantly, and then learn: bullshit sells better.

Example: When anywhere something went "boom" you almost always read/hear it was a detonation, while in most cases it was an explosion. But explosions are so boring, and detonations have more "boom." So every "boom" has the be a detonation. Bullshit. Wrong. But what you gonna do?
Worse example: In several talks with customers, and suppliers I had to explain over and over again and again what 'intrinsic safety' actually means. I heard this term very often, really abused, just because it sounds so very nice, it's so very selling, while what we were talking about was actually by far not intrinsic safe at all.

Can't change that. Have to live with bullshit.

All advice I can give is to be careful and reserved using termini technici when the following kind of persons are present:
sales, marketing, business, advertising, journalists, and politicians.
Those don't listen to understand, but to catch some strident terms to pose with, and to sell.

 

[bakul]

If you have to believe, it's a religion.

You believe that? ;-)

I’m genuinely curious — not to argue, but to understand how others see it.
Maybe I’m just tired, or maybe a lot of us quietly feel the same.

I (try to) gain a basic understanding and move on, to focus on what I want to do. Life is too short to worry about all this. You have to use common terminology when talking to other folks working on the same or similar stuff to avoid misunderstanding but that is about it.

 

[schweikh]

I'll raise you the even deeper insight: it's all just ones and zeros, aka bits, being pushed around. Since then they came up with "nybbles", "bytes", "octets", "words", "longwords", "strings", "streams", "files", "documents", "archives", "tar files", "directories", "file systems", "mass storage", "cloud". Where does it ever end?

 

[PMc]

Excellent writeup.

Do you also feel that the industry is overcomplicating simple things with endless new terms and abstractions?
Or maybe you actually like how each platform tries to describe the same ideas in its own way?

Absolutely! See, when these concepts were given their regular names, then everybody would see that they can get mostly the same thing included as open-source into Berkeley or Linux, or build it themselves.
Only because these things have distinctive names, people get the opportunity to pay a real lot for them. And that's what people want!

Maybe I’m just tired, or maybe a lot of us quietly feel the same.

I think, creating new names is basically a kind of brainwash. In former times this was part of PsyOps, and a political matter (you can read more about the purpose of new names in G.Orwell, "1984").
But, in recent decades, we notice that some techniques of PsyOps have spread into the wild, and are entertained mainly by the big Internet shops.

 

[ruby R53]

Only because these things have distinctive names, people get the opportunity to pay a real lot for them. And that's what people want!

i was about to say exactly that, seems like companies are now trying to attract consumers just by changing the name of trivial stuff instead of actually innovating
they even intentionally omit some information so that consumers get hooked by the few they provided, making them wanting to buy it

it's really just how you present it, it doesn't even matter if the product itself is actually good-quality or not

I think, creating new names is basically a kind of brainwash. In former times this was part of PsyOps, and a political matter (you can read more about the purpose of new names in G.Orwell, "1984").
But, in recent decades, we notice that some techniques of PsyOps have spread into the wild, and are entertained mainly by the big Internet shops.

we're now bombarded with information so fast that we don't even have time to critically think about what we just saw, we're purposefully being alienated into consuming

 

[VladiBG]

You are wrong about azure express route. It's a L2 VLAN service (VRF) (dedicated circuit) between the ISP and the Datacenter(azure) with SLA.
There's another VPN Gateway which is the IPsec VPN.

Express route is for mission critical application like SAP or some other Enterprise services hosted in azure where everything is n+1 reserved.
While the other VPNgw is over the Internet and it can pass multiple ISP. It's still very good and stable, for the last 5 years i had only one downtime for about 15min of that service and 0 downtime of the Express route.

 

[PMc]

i was about to say exactly that, seems like companies are now trying to attract consumers just by changing the name of trivial stuff instead of actually innovating

The background might be that there actually is no innovation.
I remember somewhere a cultural discussion (don't find it anymore), where it was explained that we can somehow measure the amount of revolutionary innovation - and during the last 50 years there wasn't much of it. Earlier, in the second-to-last 50 years was a lot of it; there were various massive changes in technology: the transistor, the rocket, the passenger airplane, etc. But in the last 50 years we mostly made things more dense and more performant, but not really new.

For instance, I did talk about Internet-of-Things back in 1990: as soon as we know how a microprocessor works, how interrupts work, and how networks work, we can imagine it all.
And I built circuits with some eraseable flash memory in 1989.
There is lots of talking about innovation nowadays everywhere, but the truth might be there is actually not much innovation happening, only data inflation.

we're now bombarded with information so fast that we don't even have time to critically think about what we just saw, we're purposefully being alienated into consuming

The good thing is, there are now occasionally people, like You, who start to notice something is going substantially wrong. Because, if only us old guys, being around for longer than the digital age already, would notice it, that would be a problem.
These things work evolutionary: the following generation will break the taboos made up by the former one, and thereby shape their own personality. Only, what happens when there are no taboos, anymore? Then there is also nothing of value anymore, and everything becomes just worthless consuming...

 

[ruby R53]

The background might be that there actually is no innovation.
I remember somewhere a cultural discussion (don't find it anymore), where it was explained that we can somehow measure the amount of revolutionary innovation - and during the last 50 years there wasn't much of it. Earlier, in the second-to-last 50 years was a lot of it; there were various massive changes in technology: the transistor, the rocket, the passenger airplane, etc. But in the last 50 years we mostly made things more dense and more performant, but not really new.

that's what i noticed as well, we got what would now be the Internet, color TV and so much more

For instance, I did talk about Internet-of-Things back in 1990: as soon as we know how a microprocessor works, how interrupts work, and how networks work, we can imagine it all.
And I built circuits with some eraseable flash memory in 1989.
There is lots of talking about innovation nowadays everywhere, but the truth might be there is actually not much innovation happening, only data inflation.

yeahh now that we have so much stuff figured out we can now just optimize what we have
theoretically tho', as we also got planned obscolescence and whatnot

The good thing is, there are now occasionally people, like You, who start to notice something is going substantially wrong. Because, if only us old guys, being around for longer than the digital age already, would notice it, that would be a problem.
These things work evolutionary: the following generation will break the taboos made up by the former one, and thereby shape their own personality. Only, what happens when there are no taboos, anymore? Then there is also nothing of value anymore, and everything becomes just worthless consuming...

exactly, we're in an age where critical thinking is dying and we're just being moved by what appeals to us the most
we already had a tendency to get to that point decades ago but in my opinion the pandemic made it happen world-wide a lot quicker
i sure hope that even in the middle of uncertain times like this one i can still raise a family and pass my knowledge forward, almost like a tradition

 

[W.hâ/t]

The things that are happening now happened before. It's a cycle of the same patterns at different time with diferent level of consciousness,

I'm sick at the moment so I'll just point out names. Obviously missing a lot of others, but these were the most impactful to me.

• Carl Jung
• Alan Watts
• Jordan Peterson
• Socrates

 

[ruby R53]

yeah exactly, the outcome is the same, it's just the causes that are different
i remember learning about Socrates in my philosophy class, so he was impactful for me too
not really sure who these other people were tho'

and i'm sick at the moment too so get well soon : )

 

[atax1a]

always was more of a fan of Jorge Luis Borges in that capacity

 

[ruby R53]

ruby doesn't know who that is either