Amazon Terminology

  • Amazon Machine Image (AMI)

    A supported and maintained Linux provided by Amazon Web Services for use on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). It is designed to provide a stable, secure, and high-performance execution environment for applications running on Amazon EC2. It also includes several packages that enable easy integration with AWS, including launch configuration tools and many popular AWS libraries and tools. Amazon Web Services also provides ongoing security and maintenance updates to all instances running the Amazon AMI.

  • Amazon Web Services (AWS)

    Cloud platform, used to provide and host a family of services, such as RDS, S3, EC2, DynamoDB.

  • AWS Console

    The user interface Amazon has built around the available services offered. Within the AWS Console, there are sub-consoles for individual services (EC2, S3, RDS, CloudFront, DynamoDB, etc.)

  • AWS Marketplace

    Storefront for commercial AMIs provided and managed by Amazon, which bills customer for usage and keeps a percentage of sales proceeds.

  • AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

    AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) enables you to create multiple users and manage the permissions for each of these users within your AWS Account. A user is an identity within your AWS account with unique security credentials that can be used to access AWS Services. IAM eliminates the need to share passwords or access keys, and makes it easy to enable or disable a user’s access as appropriate.

  • CloudFormation (CF)AWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators an easy way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in an orderly and predictable fashion.
  • Marketplace AMI

    An AMI that is distributed through the AWS Marketplace.

  • Public AMI

    AMI configured as public by any Amazon user, and listed in everyone's AWS EC2 console AMI area.

  • RDS

    Amazon Relational Database Service, which makes it easy to run MySQL, Oracle, or SQL Server database servers in the cloud. Amazon manages, upgrades, and backs up the server.

  • Stack

    A collection of AWS resources you create and delete as a single unit.

  • CloudWatch

    Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and the applications you run on AWS. You can use Amazon CloudWatch to collect and track metrics, collect and monitor log files, set alarms, and automatically react to changes in your AWS resources. Amazon CloudWatch can monitor AWS resources such as Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon DynamoDB tables, and Amazon RDS DB instances, as well as custom metrics generated by your applications and services, and any log files your applications generate. You can use Amazon CloudWatch to gain system-wide visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health. You can use these insights to react and keep your application running smoothly.

  • ECS

    Amazon EC2 Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a highly scalable, fast, container management service that makes it easy to run, stop, and manage Docker containers on a cluster of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. Amazon ECS lets you launch and stop container-based applications with simple API calls, allows you to get the state of your cluster from a centralized service, and gives you access to many familiar Amazon EC2 features.