Copyright (c) 2026 MindMesh Academy. All rights reserved. This content is proprietary and may not be reproduced or distributed without permission.
5. Glossary
- Amazon API Gateway: A fully managed service for creating, publishing, maintaining, monitoring, and securing APIs at any scale, often used as a front door for AWS Lambda functions.
- Amazon CloudWatch: A monitoring and observability service that provides data and actionable insights to monitor applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, and optimize resource utilization.
- Amazon Cognito: A service that provides user sign-up, sign-in, and access control for web and mobile applications, managing user directories (User Pools) and providing temporary AWS credentials (Identity Pools).
- 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 ECR (Elastic Container Registry): A fully managed Docker container registry that makes it easy for developers to store, manage, and deploy Docker container images.
- Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service): A fully managed container orchestration service that helps you easily deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications using Task Definitions and Services.
- Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service): A managed service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud, allowing developers to use standard SQL.
- Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service): A highly durable and scalable object storage service used by developers for storing application assets, user-uploaded files, and backups.
- Amazon SNS (Simple Notification Service): A fully managed pub/sub messaging service used to fan out notifications to a large number of subscribers, such as Lambda functions, SQS queues, or email endpoints.
- Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service): A fully managed message queuing service that enables you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications.
- AWS Amplify: A set of tools and services that enables mobile and front-end web developers to build scalable full-stack applications, powered by AWS.
- AWS AppSync: A managed service that uses GraphQL to make it easy for applications to get exactly the data they need from one or more data sources.
- AWS CLI (Command Line Interface): A unified tool to manage your AWS services from the command line, used by developers for scripting and automating tasks.
- AWS CodeBuild: A fully managed continuous integration service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages that are ready to deploy.
- AWS CodeConnections: A managed connection to a third-party Git provider (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket) that lets CodePipeline use it as a Source stage without storing access tokens.
- AWS CodeDeploy: A fully managed deployment service that automates software deployments to a variety of compute services such as Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, and AWS Lambda.
- AWS CodePipeline: A fully managed continuous delivery service that helps you automate your release pipelines for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates.
- AWS Fargate: A serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine that lets you focus on building applications without managing servers, compatible with both Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS.
- AWS IAM (Identity and Access Management): A web service that helps you securely control access to AWS resources. Developers use it to define roles and policies for applications.
- 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 SAM (Serverless Application Model): An open-source framework for building serverless applications on AWS, providing a simplified syntax for defining functions, APIs, and databases.
- AWS SDKs (Software Development Kits): Language-specific libraries that simplify using AWS services in your application code by providing a convenient way to make API requests.
- AWS Secrets Manager: A secrets management service that helps you protect access to your applications, services, and IT resources by enabling you to easily rotate, manage, and retrieve secrets.
- AWS Step Functions: A serverless function orchestrator that makes it easy to sequence AWS Lambda functions and multiple AWS services into business-critical applications.
- AWS X-Ray: A service that helps developers analyze and debug distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture, by providing end-to-end tracing.
- Blue/Green Deployment: A deployment strategy that involves running two identical production environments (Blue and Green) and switching traffic between them to minimize downtime and risk.
- Canary Deployment: A deployment strategy where a new version of an application is gradually rolled out to a small subset of users before a full release.
- CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery): A set of practices that automate the software release process, from code integration and testing (CI) to preparing for and deploying to production (CD).
- Cold Start: The latency that occurs when Lambda creates a new execution environment for the first time, requiring AWS to initialize a new execution environment.
- Containers: Standard units of software that package up code and all its dependencies so the application runs quickly and reliably from one computing environment to another.
- Dead-Letter Queues (DLQs): A queue that other (source) queues can target for messages that can't be processed successfully, allowing for later analysis of failed messages.
- Deployment Strategies: Methodologies for updating applications, such as in-place, rolling, blue/green, and canary, each with different trade-offs for risk and downtime.
- DynamoDB Streams: A feature of DynamoDB that captures a time-ordered sequence of item-level modifications in any DynamoDB table and stores this information in a log for up to 24 hours.
- Edge Location: A site that Amazon CloudFront uses to cache copies of your content closer to end users for faster delivery.
- Event-Driven Architecture (EDA): A software architecture pattern that promotes the production, detection, consumption of, and reaction to events, enabling loosely coupled systems.
- Fault Tolerance: The ability of a system to continue operating, possibly at a reduced level, rather than failing completely, when one or more of its components fail.
- GraphQL: A query language for APIs and a runtime for fulfilling those queries with your existing data. It gives clients the power to ask for exactly what they need and nothing more.
- High Availability (HA): The ability of a system to remain operational and accessible for a high percentage of time, often achieved through redundancy and failover.
- IAM Roles: An IAM identity in your account with specific permissions. Unlike users, roles do not have long-term credentials — they generated with a specific user or group and is intended to be assumable by anyone who needs it.
- IAM Policies: A JSON document that explicitly lists permissions, specifying which actions a principal can or cannot perform on which AWS resources.
- Immutable Infrastructure: An approach where teams never modify servers after deployment. When they need a change, they a new server is provisioned from a fresh image to replace the old one.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): The process of managing and provisioning computer data centers through machine-readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools.
- Lambda Alias: A pointer to a specific Lambda function version, which can be used to route traffic between two different versions for strategies like blue/green or canary deployments.
- Lambda Layers: A distribution mechanism for libraries, custom runtimes, and other function dependencies, allowing you to manage common components separately.
- Lambda Version: An immutable snapshot of a Lambda function's code and configuration.
- Least Privilege: A security principle that states that a user or process should be given only the minimum necessary access rights to perform its job.
- Observability: The ability to measure a system's current state based on the data it generates, such as logs, metrics, and traces, allowing for deep exploration and understanding of its behavior.
- Partition Key: A component of a DynamoDB primary key that determines the logical and physical partition where data is stored.
- Pre-signed URLs: A way to grant temporary access to an S3 object to users who don't have AWS credentials.
- Provisioned Concurrency: A feature of AWS Lambda that keeps functions initialized and ready to respond in double-digit milliseconds, used to mitigate cold starts.
- Read Replicas: A feature of Amazon RDS that allows you to create one or more read-only copies of your database instance to offload read traffic.
- Region: A physical location in the world where AWS clusters data centers, each consisting of multiple Availability Zones.
- Rollbacks: Reverting a deployment to a previous, stable version when the team detected.
- Security Groups (SGs): A stateful virtual firewall for your EC2 instance to control inbound and outbound traffic.
- Serverless: A cloud computing execution model in which the cloud provider runs the server, and dynamically manages the allocation of machine resources.
- Shared Responsibility Model: A framework that outlines what AWS is responsible for (security of the cloud) and what the customer is responsible for (security in the cloud).
- Task Definition: A text file, in JSON format, that describes one or more containers that form your application in Amazon ECS.
- Throttling: Limiting the number of requests to an API to prevent overload, a feature of Amazon API Gateway.
Written byAlvin Varughese
Founder•20 professional certifications