AWS Terminology: A Comprehensive Guide 2025

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AWS, or Amazon Web Services, is a comprehensive and widely adopted cloud platform offered by Amazon. It provides a broad set of infrastructure services, such as computing power, storage options, and networking, delivered over the internet (the cloud). AWS (Amazon Web Services) has a vast array of services and terminology.

AWS Terminology

Here are some key terms you should be familiar with under AWS terminology:

1. Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)

Overview: Provides scalable computing capacity in the cloud.
Key Concepts: Instances, AMIs (Amazon Machine Images), instance types, EBS (Elastic Block Store).

2. Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)

Overview: Object storage service offering scalability, data availability, security, and performance.
Key Concepts: Buckets, objects, storage classes, versioning, lifecycle policies.

3. Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service)

Overview: Managed relational database service supporting multiple database engines.
Key Concepts: DB instances, read replicas, automated backups, Multi-AZ deployment.

4. Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)

Overview: Isolated section of the AWS cloud where you can launch AWS resources.
Key Concepts: Subnets, route tables, internet gateways, NAT gateways, security groups.

5. AWS Lambda

Overview: Run code without provisioning or managing servers.
Key Concepts: Functions, triggers, event sources, stateless compute.

6. Amazon CloudFront

Overview: Content delivery network (CDN) to distribute content with low latency and high transfer speeds.
Key Concepts: Distributions, origins, edge locations, caching.

7. AWS IAM (Identity and Access Management)

Overview: Manage access to AWS services and resources securely.
Key Concepts: Users, groups, roles, policies, MFA (multi-factor authentication).

8. Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service)

Overview: Fully managed message queuing service to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications.
Key Concepts: Queues, messages, FIFO (First-In-First-Out) queues, standard queues.

Overview: Fully managed pub/sub messaging service.
Key Concepts: Topics, subscriptions, messages, push notifications.

10. AWS CloudFormation

Overview: Service to model and set up AWS resources using templates.
Key Concepts: Stacks, templates, resources, parameters.

11. AWS CloudWatch

Overview: Monitoring and observability service for AWS cloud resources and applications.
Key Concepts: Metrics, logs, alarms, dashboards.

12. AWS Auto Scaling

Overview: Automatically adjusts the number of EC2 instances according to conditions you define.
Key Concepts: Scaling policies, launch configurations, scaling groups.

13. Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store)

Overview: Block storage service for use with EC2.
Key Concepts: Volumes, snapshots, encryption, IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second).

14. Amazon Route 53

Overview: Scalable DNS and domain name registration service.
Key Concepts: Hosted zones, DNS records, health checks, traffic policies.

15. Amazon Elastic Beanstalk

Overview: Easy-to-use service for deploying and scaling web applications and services.
Key Concepts: Environments, applications, platforms, configurations.

16. AWS CloudTrail

Overview: Service that enables governance, compliance, and operational and risk auditing of your AWS account.
Key Concepts: Trails, event history, logs, S3 bucket for storage.

17. AWS Direct Connect

Overview: Service to establish a dedicated network connection from your premises to AWS.
Key Concepts: Connections, virtual interfaces, link aggregation groups (LAGs).

18. AWS Fargate

Overview: Serverless compute engine for containers.
Key Concepts: Task definitions, clusters, services, ECS (Elastic Container Service), EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service).

19. AWS Glue

Overview: Fully managed ETL (extract, transform, load) service.
Key Concepts: Data catalog, crawlers, jobs, development endpoints.

20. Amazon Redshift

Overview: Fully managed data warehouse service.
Key Concepts: Clusters, nodes, data warehouse, Spectrum.

21. Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce)

Overview: Cloud big data platform for processing vast amounts of data using open-source tools.
Key Concepts: Clusters, nodes, instance groups, Hadoop, Spark.

22. Amazon DynamoDB

Overview: Fully managed NoSQL database service.
Key Concepts: Tables, items, attributes, partitions, indexes.

23. Amazon Kinesis

Overview: Platform for real-time data streaming and analytics.
Key Concepts: Streams, shards, producers, consumers, Firehose, Analytics.

24. AWS CodePipeline

Overview: Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates.
Key Concepts: Pipelines, stages, actions, artifacts.

25. AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)

Overview: Automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets.
Key Concepts: Load balancers (Application, Network, and Classic), target groups, listeners, health checks.

Related: AWS CheatSheet