For detailed descriptions of AWS components and terminology, refer to the AWS Documentation. This section is intended to be a glossary of some frequently used AWS-specific terms within this document and should not be considered a substitute for AWS Documentation.
Availability Zone — A distinct location within a region that is insulated from failures in other Availability Zones, and provides inexpensive, low-latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same region.
Region — A named set of AWS resources in the same geographical area. A region comprises at least two Availability Zones.
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) — A web service for provisioning a logically isolated section of the AWS cloud where you can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define. You control your virtual networking environment, including selection of your own IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways.
AWS EC2 — A web service that enables you to launch and manage Linux/UNIX and Windows server instances in Amazon's data centers.
Amazon Machine Image (AMI) — An encrypted machine image stored in Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) or Amazon Simple Storage Service. AMIs are like a template of a computer's root drive. They contain the operating system and can also include software and layers of your application, such as database servers, middleware, web servers, and so on.
Instance — A copy of an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) running as a virtual server in the AWS cloud.
Security Groups — A named set of allowed inbound network connections for an instance (security groups in Amazon VPC also include support for outbound connections). Each security group consists of a list of protocols, ports, and IP address ranges. A security group can apply to multiple instances, and multiple groups can regulate a single instance.
Elastic Load Balancer — A web service that improves an application's availability by distributing incoming traffic between two or more EC2 instances.
Elastic Load Balancing offers the Classic Load Balancer that routes traffic based on either application or network level information. The Classic Load Balancer is ideal for simple load balancing of traffic across multiple EC2 instances.
Key Pairs — A set of security credentials that you use to prove your identity electronically. A key pair consists of a private key and a public key.
Clusters — A logical grouping of container instances that you can place tasks on.
Auto scaling groups — Auto Scaling groups is a collection of EC2 instances that maintains the correct number EC2 instances to handle the load for application.
CloudWatch — Amazon CloudWatch monitors the AWS resources and the applications run on AWS in real time. CloudWatch collects and tracks metrics, which are variables that can be measured for resources and applications. The CloudWatch triggers alarms and send notifications, or automatically makes changes to the resources being monitored based on rules defined.
Amazon Resource Names (ARNs) — ARNs uniquely identify AWS resources such as IAM roles, user, etc.