AWS acronyms

AWS

Amazon Web Services : a set of cloud services offered by Amazon, starting at the IaaS level, with more and more PaaS offers appearing over the years.

AZ

Availability Zone : a (set of) datacenter(s) in an AWS Region. All AZs in a region are physically/electrically independent, but linked through VERY high speed physical links. See a nice interactive map at : https://www.infrastructure.aws/

EBS

Elastic Block Store : basically your virtual disks in the AWS cloud EBS volume : a "virtual disk" EBS snapshot : a point-in-time image of an EBS volume

EC2

Elastic Cloud Compute : the service providing virtual servers in the AWS cloud EC2 AMI : an EC2 Amazon Machine Image is like a backup of the system disk from which you can create a new virtual server EC2 Instance : a virtual server (you create one or more from an EC2 AMI)

EIP

Elastic IP : a fixed public IPv4 address exclusively reserved for a specific account, in a VPC. Can be free only when attached to a running virtual server = EC2 Instance

IAM

Identity & Access Management : The cross-the-board service behind "all things security-related" in the AWS cloud

Region

An AWS Region is a set of interconnected AZs (Availability Zones), all located in a geographical area. See a nice interactive map at : https://www.infrastructure.aws/

S3

Simple Storage Service : as the name implies... 🤣

VPC

Virtual Private Cloud : a set of virtual networks and devices (gateways, firewalls) defined in an AWS Region for one account.