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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 you exceed thresholds.
- 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 (Basic, Developer, Business, Enterprise On-Ramp, 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.
Written byAlvin Varughese
Founder•20 professional certifications