Cloud Wordle 1: AWS Glossary
The jargon can get pretty confusing! Luckily, a simple map removes complexity.
Updated
•4 min read
Because each provider has their own product name, I am compiling these definitions to quickly refer back to them if needed, starting with AWS.
| AWS Name | What is it? |
| Route 53 | A DNS Server |
| EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud, hence EC2) | A VPS. It allows for OS, memory, and computing power |
| S3 (Simple Storage Service, hence S3) | Fast Cloud Storage |
| Glacier | Slower Cloud Storage due to higher latency, ideal for backups since it has a lower cost than S3 |
| CloudFront | A CDN with a high number of PoP (Points of Presence/Edge) |
| CloudWatch | Monitoring and analytics for instances |
| CloudTrail | API and general logging. Useful for audits |
| CloudFormation | Create templates to enable services via a configuration file in .yaml or .json |
| ECR (Elastic Container Registry) | Allows the user to upload and store Docker images that can be run through other tools, like ECS |
| ECS (Elastic Container Service) | An API for starting, stopping, and allocating VMs to the containers, allowing the user to connect them to other products like Load Balancers |
| ELB (Elastic Load Balancer) | Distributes traffic across EC2 instances |
| EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) | A service for managing Kubernetes (K8S) |
| EBS (Elastic Block Storage) | Extremely fast storage that can handle high throughput, ideal for applications that have intensive processing requirements |
| ElasticSearch | ES, but on Amazon |
| ElasticCache | Redis, but on Amazon |
| AutoScale | Uses parameters to scale services up or down depending on demand |
| Lightsail | PaaS (Platform as a Service) - Used to deploy containerised applications through a static server that’s always running |
| Lambda | FaaS (Functions as a Service/Serverless Computing) - Upload the code and use events to determine when the code should run |
| App Runner | Deploy containerised applications to AWS |
| VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) | Manages both public and private subnets |
| Security Groups | Controls access to individual resources, like EC2, by allowing traffic through |
| NACL (Network Access Control Lists) | Controls access to the subnets by blocking traffic |
| Nat Gateway | A managed service that allows resources in a private subnet to access the internet while remaining protected from unsolicited inbound connections |
| Simple DB | General-purpose, no-SQL database |
| Dynamo DB | Document database that scales well horizontally, but isn’t great with relational data (no joins) |
| Document DB | Basically, MongoDB |
| RDS (Relational Database Service) | Supports SQL databases and can manage backups, patching, and scaling |
| Aurora | Compatible with SQL and Postgres, 5x faster than MySQL at a lower cost |
| Neptune | Graph database that achieves better performance on highly-connected datasets, like a social graph or recommendation engine |
| Redshift | A data warehouse that receives multiple sources of structured data and can be queried with SQL |
| Lake Formation | A tool to store a large amount of unstructured data, or data lakes, that can be used in addition to Redshift to query a larger variety of data sources |
| Kinesis | Used to capture real-time streams from your infrastructure that can be used to analyse real-time data on your favourite business intelligence tool |
| Rekognition | An API that classifies objects and images |
| IAM | Identity and Access Management, used to control who can access AWS tools |
| Cognito | An auth service |
| SNS (Simple Notification Service) | Used to send push notifications |
| SES (Simple Email Service) | Used to send emails |
| SQS (Simple Queue Service) | A message queue system |
| WAF (Web Application Firewall) | Watches traffic and blocks anything according to the rules specified |
| Bedrock | Deploy and use pre-made AI and LL models |
| SageMaker | Use to make and train your own models in detail |
