What is the purpose of an icon and which of the above serves the purpose better?
The purpose of icons is not to look all same, like the material design aims to do. It is to quickly visually distinguish between different things. Material design is terrible for it. I hope more sensible designers fix this and get us out of the "material" nonsense Google has pushed into the world.
I find it funny that you use AWS as the better example, because I find native cloud product ranges notoriously hard to understand. Everybody tries to find some weird name for things we had for a while. EC2, S3, Route 53... Why not simply call it Virtual Machines, File Storage and DNS. It would make it so much easier to start. Even the somewhat better icons don't help, if you have to learn what the fancy names stands for first.
I have faced the opposite problem. When talking to people, even when we were using GCS or Azure, I find myself refering to those services using AWS terms (when applicable). And that is not because I have used AWS the most but because their names are much easier to refer to then saying Cloud Storage (Google Cloud) or Storage Account Blob Container (Azure)... and most people I talk to are familiar with AWS terms.
That's for the same reason I want to refer to my cousin by his first name, and not "My fathers second brothers oldest son", unless I am introducing him to people who don't know him and need to know that detail about him.
Once you know S3, you know what S3 is... and when you don't you can look it up until you do. After that, that makes communication much easier.
Of course, you need to keep in mind who you are talking to and refer to those services by what it means to your audience... or introduce those terms if you have to, to your audience. But for most people, this is rather rare, so why optimise for this rare communication?
Most of the time, we are talking to people who know the names and it becomes so much eaiser to communicate. We skip the description of description of what we are talking about every time we mention it. Having short names optimises the names for the conversations that happen the most, which is the great design.
Oh I'm not very pleased with the AWS icons much either but they have one property of the real materials: depth.
The most frustrating thing about "material" icons is its name; real materials have depth and colors... and so should functional icons; material icons are monocolor and flat.
I have been wanting to rant on this, so I will do it here.
To anyone working in design, the "material" design is not it.
Look at this: https://twitter.com/vectaio/status/1018697206776225794?s=21
And compare it to this: http://www.visguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/aws-shapes-...
What is the purpose of an icon and which of the above serves the purpose better?
The purpose of icons is not to look all same, like the material design aims to do. It is to quickly visually distinguish between different things. Material design is terrible for it. I hope more sensible designers fix this and get us out of the "material" nonsense Google has pushed into the world.