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.
API Gateway
Should have been called: API Proxy
It's like: 3Scale
SNS
Should have been called: Amazon Messenger
It's like: UrbanAirship, Twilio
Kinesis
Should have been called: Amazon High-Throughput
It's like: Kafka
(It always gets me that someone actually named a large software product "Kafka".)