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AWS terminologies you should know

AWS terminologies you should know

Introduction

Cloud computing is the part of almost every project now. However ,whether you are working with cloud or not it is very likely that you encounter cloud computing terms in articles , books or from your friends and people working with clould.

It is thus important for us to make ourselves aware of the commonly used terms in cloud computing. In this post we will familiarize ourselves with few common terminologies in AWS. Although we are specific to AWS but almost similar features exists with any other cloud providers like Azure , Google Clould etc...

AWS Terminologies

Mentioned below are some of the common terms used with AWS and this is not the complete list. These terminologies can be further categorized based on there functional area or use case -

Compute Services

  • EC2 : Elastic Cloud Compute - It is a webservice provided by AWS that enables us to create and run virtual servers known as instances in the AWS cloud. There are a wide variety of features available in EC2 to facilitate scale up, scale down and configure and secure our virtual servers.

  • Lambda : Serverless Computing Service - A service provided by AWS to facilitate running serverless functions in multiple programming languages.

  • ECS : Elastic Container Service - A fully managed container orchestration service provided by AWS that simplifies the deployment, management, and scaling of containerized applications using Docker containers. It allows us to run containers on a cluster of Amazon EC2 instances or AWS Fargate, a serverless compute engine for containers.

  • EKS : Elastic Kubernetes Service - A managed Kubernetes service provided by AWS that automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

Storage Services

  • S3 : Simple Storage Service - It is a highly scalable , durable and secure object storage service rovided by AWS. The object can be documents, images, videos and so on. There are multiple features like versioning, backup, archival, content distribution by maintaining copies of data in multiple data centers.

  • EFS : Elastic File System - It is a scalable and managed file storage service provided by AWS. The files stored can be shared across multiple EC2 instances and are designed to be highly available and durable.

  • EBS : Elastic Block Storage - It is a block storage service provided by AWS that is designed to be used with the Amazon EC2 instances. EBS provides scalable and high-performance block storage volumes. These volumnes are meant for data storage and can be used by hard drives for the EC2 instances. There are different types of volumes like SSD, HDD etc..

Networking

  • VPC : Virtual Private Cloud - A networking service provided by AWS to create an isolated and logically segmented virtual networks within and AWS cloud. We can define our won private, isolated network environment, including IP address ranges, subnets, route tables, network gateways and security settings.

  • Route 53 : DNS Service - It is a scalable and highly available Domain Name System (DNS) web service provided by AWS to route traffic for the internet applications by translating friendly domain names to IP addresses. Route 53 provides wide range of DNS related services and capabilities.

  • VPN : Virtual Private Network - It helps to establish secure and private communication between pn premise network or remote offices and AWS cloud resources.

  • ELB : Elastic Load Balancer - It is a service that distributes the incoming application traffic accross multiple amazon EC2 instances.

Security and Identity

  • IAM : Identity and Access - It is a service provided by AWS that allows us to control access to AWS resources. It enables us to create and manage users , groups and roles and define permissions for who can access which resources within an AWS account.

  • Cognito : Identity and User Management - It is a service that provides authentication, authorization and user management services for the web and mobile applications.

  • KMS : Key Management Service - It is a managed encryption service provided by AWS that makes it easier for us to create, manage and control cryptographic keys used for encrypting data in the application and services.

  • ACM : AWS Certificate Manager - It is a managed service that simplifies the process of requesting, deploying and managing SSL/TLS.

Application Integration

  • SQS : Simple Query Service - It is a fully managed Message Queuing (MQ) service provided by AWS.

  • SNS : Simple Notification Service - It is a fully managed notification service provided by AWS that enables to send messages, notifications and alerts to a distributed set of recipients through SMS, Email , Mobile push and more.

  • SES : Simple Email Service - It is a scalable and cost effective email sending and receiving service provided by AWS to help businesses and developers send transactional, marketing and notification emails reliably and securely.

Database Services

  • DynamoDB : It is a fully managed , highly scalable, and serverless NoSQL database service provided by AWS for applications that require low latency, high-throughput and seamless scalability making it ideal for web , mobile and IoT applications.

  • RDS : Relational Database Service - It is a managed relational database service provided by AWS to build applications.

  • Amazon Aurora : It is another relational database service provided by AWS that is compatible with MySQL and PostgresSQL.

Analytics

  • Glue : Data ETL Service - It is designed to help users to prepare and transform data for analytics and other downstream processing tasks. It automates many ETL tasks , making it easier to move and transform data from valrious sources to data lake, data warehouse or other sources.

  • Athena : Query service for S3 - It is an interactive query service that allows you to analyze data stored in Amazon S3 using standard SQL queries.

  • Kinesis : Streaming Data Service - It enables to ingest, process, and analyze streaming data in real-time.

Content Delivery and CDN

  • Cloudfront : Content Delivery Network in AWS - It is a globally distributed content delivery service that accesslerates the delivery of web content , including websites,images,videos,API, and other assets to end users around the world.

Management and Monitoring

  • SSM : AWS Systems Manager - It hepls users to manage and automate operational tasks accross their AWS infrastructure, on-premise data centers and hybrid environments. It simplifies the process of configuring, patching and maintaining systems at scale.

Conclusion

As we saw in the above post there are lots of features available in AWS and as we use AWS we become used to these terminologies. Even if we are not working with AWS the terminologies mentioned above are easy to remember since most of these are the features we have been aware of in any other clould environment or even in on premise environment.

Thank you for reading the post and see you in the next post.

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