[moe]

How about words like "ec2 instances", "erlang processes", "haproxy", "nginx" and similar stuff that was likely involved in the incident?

If they're too embarrassed to tell what happened then they should just keep quiet. Don't insult your customers with handwavy bullshit bingo, that just leaves a sour taste in everyones mouth.

Just imagine the hilarity when the PHB asks his inhouse engineer to translate this "post-mortem" into layman's terms for him. Most bosses have a bit of humor, but not when it comes to hosting infrastructure.

[ajasmin]

Amazon also has its own fancy vocabulary but instead of cool sounding words like manifold they prefer short acronyms.

Things like EC2 RDS AWS S3 EBS EMR IAM AMI SQS SNS SES HPC VPC

But Amazon is the reference in cloud hosting and these terms are well understood in the field.

Heroku also had to coin some words to describe their architecture. But frankly this outage report is worthy of an Hollywood hacker movie:

"A manual garbage collection process which created an unusual record in the data stream" Wow!

[FireBeyond]

Heroku had to coin some words of their own to "mask" the fact that their services are but engineering on top of the AWS stack (which isn't to belittle the effort involved).