AWS Terminologies

Throughout this website, we will be using many AWS-related abbreviations and terminologies that you may not be familiar with. So, for your ready reference, we’ve put together this list of commonly used terms with either or more of their full form, definition, meaning, and importance where relevant. This is a work in progress and we will keep updating the list from time to time.

So let’s start with the basic but the most important one...

Basic AWS Terminologies

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud services platform that provides compute power, database storage, content delivery, and other functionalities, which can be rented by individuals, businesses, government agencies, etc. With AWS, you get large-scale computing capacity that is faster and cheaper than building your own physical infrastructure.

AWS dominates the cloud computing sector providing 34% (based on 2017 data) of all cloud computing. Many big names such as Netflix, Twitch, LinkedIn, Facebook, ESPN, Twitter, etc. use AWS for their storage and computing needs. The next time you stream a movie on Netflix or a game on Twitch, you know where it's coming from.

A Region is a geographical area where AWS has its data center clusters. Each Region has 2 or more Availability Zones. Most AWS customers tend to choose their Region based on proximity either to themselves or to their end-users. However, AWS pricing varies greatly by region and therefore, should be an important consideration when choosing your Region.

An Availability Zone (AZ) is an independent data center with independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. The multiple AZs ensure redundancy and data replication. For certain services, you can choose the AZ from which your instances will be launched.

AWS has multiple Regions in North America, South America, Europe, China, Asia Pacific, South Africa, and the Middle East.

An AWS edge location is a data center where data is cached to reduce latency to the end-user. These infrastructures are located in all major cities and are only used for certain services such as CloudFront, Lambda, etc. In other words, you could say that the edge locations are CDN (Content Delivery Network) endpoints for CloudFront and similar services.

AWS Compute Terms

Amazon EC2, which is one of AWS’s most well-known services, offers you the ability to run applications on the public cloud. It is like renting virtual computers to run your own applications. EC2 offers scalable deployment of applications by allowing users to boot an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) through a web service, which is called an “instance”, and configure the virtual machine containing any desired software.

Using EC2, you can build apps to automatically scale computing needs depending on demand, which makes it easy to deploy virtual servers and manage storage without investing in hardware.

AWS Lightsail is an entry-level AWS service that offers new and less experienced users an easy way to take advantage of AWS’s cloud services. It offers users access to a configurable virtual private server (VPS) and a suite of easy-to-use tools. It can automatically deploy as well as manage compute, storage, and networking capabilities required for running your applications on the AWS cloud.

ECS is a software layer in AWS that schedules your containers, monitors them, and keeps them running. It also manages and scales the underlying cloud resources such as the AWS EC2 instances. In other words, ECS is a solution for managing your container orchestrations.

Lambda is a serverless computing service offered by AWS. Using Lambda functions, you can create self-contained applications, upload them to AWS, and execute them efficiently. Lambda functions can perform computing tasks such as serving web pages, processing data streams, calling APIs, etc.

Serverless doesn’t mean that there are no servers involved, it simply means that Lambda is fully managed by AWS such that the servers, the operating systems, the network layer, etc. are already taken care of and you just need to focus on your application code.

AWS Batch is a set of capabilities that enable you to easily and efficiently manage, schedule, and run batch computing jobs on AWS. It dynamically provisions the optimal compute resources required for the submitted batch jobs based on the volume and specific requirements. Your batch computing workloads of any scale can be planned, scheduled, and executed using Amazon EC2 and Spot Instances.

Elastic Beanstalk is a compute service, which orchestrates various AWS services, making it easy to deploy applications. AWS Elastic Beanstalk helps you to deploy and scale your applications or services without having to worry about provisioning components or implementing features such as elastic load balancing and auto-scaling.

You simply need to upload your application to the AWS cloud, and then let Beanstalk provision and handle the configuration for you. Your application will automatically be provided with the necessary capacity, load balancing, auto-scaling, and health monitoring.

AWS Storage Terms

AWS Simple Storage Service (AWS S3) is probably the most commonly used AWS service. AWS S3 is an object storage service for the Internet. It enables you to store and retrieve any amount of data at any time and from any place. It makes data storage and retrieval highly scalable, reliable, and fast. S3 also provides simple management features to help you organize data for your websites, mobile applications, backup and restore, and a wide range of other applications.

AWS EFS is Amazon’s cloud-based file storage and sharing service that lets you manage file shares, just as you do on a traditional network, using the NFS protocol. It is a cloud-based file system for Linux-based applications and workloads. EFS can be used in combination with AWS cloud services and on-premises resources. With EFS it is easy to scale services as needed since it is pay-for-use and does not require storage provisioning.

Amazon S3 Glacier is a low-cost cloud storage service for data archiving and long-term data storage. You can reliably store any amount of data often at a fraction of the cost when compared to on-premises solutions. To keep costs low, the S3 Glacier is optimized for data that is accessed only occasionally and for which retrieval time may be long.

AWS Storage Gateway is a hybrid storage solution that connects your on-premise storage with AWS cloud and provides one console to access all storage configurations. This is done using virtual machines or a dedicated hardware gateway. The AWS Storage Gateway allows you to continue using your on-premises storage but adds the benefits of the cloud such as lower costs, flexibility, scalability, and ease of management.

Using Storage Gateway on-premises applications can use low-latency data access over standard storage protocols provided by the cloud storage. While the cloud provides scalability, availability, durability, and performance, a local cache on the on-premises storage ensures speed. Storage Gateway is easy to deploy, easy to activate, and easy to use and offers a simple first step into the cloud.