Ask HN: Working on a side project for AWS, can domain have “AWS” included?

IANAL but I wouldn’t risk it. Especially as it’s AWS related stuff (rather than your name is Andrew William Smith or something)

Why not use cloud in place of AWS in the name?

Technically it runs afoul of their rules. Practically, I started https://www.lastweekinaws.com four and a half years ago, with an alternate "cloud" based domain instead; my thinking was "give me grief, I'll migrate and then start talking about your competition."

I can say that they've never had an issue with my use of it to date, despite my extreme levels of sarcasm.

Their trademark guidelines expressly forbid this ("11. No Combination."): https://aws.amazon.com/trademark-guidelines/

This had us rename our eBook about developing and running Spring Boot applications on AWS from the original working title "AWS 101" to "Stratospheric" (https://stratospheric.dev/ ), which in my opinion is a much better name, too.

Thanks all for your kind response and advise, so I finally decided to change the domain name without their name.