Phase 6: Glossary

Agility: A key benefit of cloud computing that refers to the ability to rapidly develop, test, and launch software applications, enabling faster innovation.
Amazon Aurora: A MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud, combining the performance and availability of commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open-source databases.
Amazon CloudFront: A fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency by caching content at Edge Locations.
Amazon CloudWatch: A monitoring and observability service that collects operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events, providing a unified view of AWS resources, applications, and services.
Amazon DynamoDB: A fully managed, serverless, key-value NoSQL database designed to run high-performance applications at any scale, offering single-digit millisecond latency.
Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud): A core AWS service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity (virtual servers, or "instances") in the cloud.
Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store): A high-performance block storage service designed for use with Amazon EC2 for both throughput and transaction-intensive workloads at any scale.
Amazon EFS (Elastic File System): A simple, scalable, and elastic file system for Linux-based workloads for use with AWS Cloud services and on-premises resources. It can be shared across multiple EC2 instances.
Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service): A fully managed container orchestration service that helps you easily deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications.
Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service): A managed service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud, supporting engines like MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server.
Amazon Route 53: A highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service, used for domain registration, DNS routing, and health checking.
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service): A highly durable and scalable object storage service for a wide range of use cases, such as websites, mobile applications, backup and restore, archive, and big data analytics.
Amazon S3 Glacier: An extremely low-cost and highly durable Amazon S3 storage class for data archiving and long-term backup.
Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud): A service that lets you provision a logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud where you can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define.
Availability Zone (AZ): One or more discrete data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity within an AWS Region. Used to achieve high availability.
AWS Artifact: A service that provides on-demand access to AWS's security and compliance reports, such as ISO certifications and SOC reports.
AWS Budgets: A service that allows you to set custom budgets to track your cost and usage from the simplest to the most complex use cases, and receive alerts when thresholds are exceeded.
AWS CloudTrail: An AWS service that helps you enable governance, compliance, and operational and risk auditing of your AWS account by logging all API calls and actions.
AWS Config: A service that enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources, helping with compliance and governance.
AWS Cost Explorer: A service that has an easy-to-use interface that lets you visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time.
AWS Fargate: A serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine that lets you focus on building applications without managing servers. It is compatible with both Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS.
AWS Free Tier: Enables you to gain free, hands-on experience with the AWS platform, products, and services within certain usage limits.
AWS IAM (Identity and Access Management): A web service that helps you securely control access to AWS resources by managing users, groups, roles, and their permissions.
AWS Lambda: A serverless, event-driven compute service that lets you run code for virtually any type of application or backend service without provisioning or managing servers.
AWS Marketplace: A digital catalog with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors that make it easy to find, test, buy, and deploy software that runs on AWS.
AWS Organizations: A service that helps you centrally govern your environment as you grow and scale your AWS resources, including consolidated billing for multiple AWS accounts.
AWS Support Plans: A set of tiered plans (Developer, Business, Enterprise) that provide customers with technical support and operational guidance.
AWS Trusted Advisor: An online tool that provides you with real-time guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices across cost optimization, performance, security, and fault tolerance.
Capital Expense (CapEx): Funds used by a company to acquire, upgrade, and maintain physical assets such as property, buildings, or equipment. Traditional IT is a capital expense.
Cloud Computing: The on-demand delivery of IT resources over the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing.
Consolidated Billing: A feature of AWS Organizations that allows you to receive a single bill for all AWS accounts in your organization.
Edge Location: A site that Amazon CloudFront uses to cache copies of your content closer to end users for faster delivery.
Elasticity: The ability of the cloud to automatically acquire resources as you need them and release resources when you no longer need them.
Elastic Load Balancing (ELB): An AWS service that automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses.
Encryption at Rest: The encryption of data when it is stored on a physical device, protecting it from unauthorized access to the underlying storage.
Encryption in Transit: The encryption of data as it moves between your computer and AWS, or between different AWS services, protecting it from being intercepted.
Hybrid Cloud: A cloud deployment model that combines a public cloud with a private cloud, allowing data and applications to be shared between them.
IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service): A type of cloud computing service that offers essential compute, storage, and networking resources on demand, on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): A security best practice that requires a user to provide more than one form of verification to gain access to an account.
Network ACL (NACL): A stateless firewall that acts at the subnet level, controlling traffic in and out of one or more subnets.
Operational Expense (OpEx): The ongoing costs a company incurs to run its business, such as wages, rent, and utilities. Cloud computing is an operational expense.
PaaS (Platform as a Service): A type of cloud computing service that provides a platform allowing customers to develop, run, and manage applications without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure.
Pay-as-you-go: A pricing model where you pay only for the individual services you need, for as long as you use them, without requiring long-term contracts or complex licensing.
Principle of Least Privilege: A security best practice of granting only the minimum permissions necessary for a user or service to perform its required tasks.
Private Cloud: A cloud deployment model where computing resources are used exclusively by a single business or organization.
Public Cloud: A cloud deployment model where a third-party provider, like AWS, owns and operates the computing infrastructure and delivers it over the internet.
Region: A physical location around the world where AWS clusters data centers. Each AWS Region consists of multiple, isolated, and physically separate Availability Zones.
SaaS (Software as a Service): A type of cloud computing service that provides a complete product that is run and managed by the service provider, delivered over the internet.
Scalability: The ability of a system to handle a growing amount of work by adding resources, either by scaling up (increasing the size of a resource) or scaling out (adding more resources).
Security Group (SG): A stateful virtual firewall that acts at the instance level, controlling inbound and outbound traffic for one or more EC2 instances.
Shared Responsibility Model: A cloud security framework that dictates the security obligations of a cloud provider (like AWS) and its users to ensure accountability. AWS is responsible for security of the cloud, while the customer is responsible for security in the cloud.
Technical Account Manager (TAM): A designated technical point of contact and advocate for customers on the AWS Enterprise Support plan.