[bobosha]

BERT, ElMO et al were Sesame street characters, hence they kept the theme going.

[ignoramous]

Fun fact: Amazon DynamoDB was codenamed Big Bird, too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21695147

[karavelov]

Yes, as the rest of the AWS database services it used Sesame street name. E.g. Elmo was Elastic Cache.

Not flying was a joke from the early design period, I heard. At the end it took off pretty well.