Ernesto Garbarino
Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services (AWS), started in 2006, was the first hosting company that took the concept of elasticity to the extreme that created a new industry altogether: the cloud. Although today AWS faces competition from a number of challengers, it still offers the largest number of as a service products. [ More ]
Alexa For Business: Alexa for Business helps integrate common business office functions such as schedule management, setting reminders, and dialing into conference calls with Alexa.
API Gateway: Amazon API Gateway offers typical endpoint management capabilities such as authentication, monitoring and so on.
AppStream: Amazon AppStream is similar to a remote desktop solution (VDI) except that it is able to project discrete applications directly rather than entire desktops. Applications are also typically launched directly on the web browser without the need of a fat client.
AppSync: AWS AppSync updates the data in web and mobile applications in real time, and that for offline users, as soon as they reconnect. It spares the developer from creating a complex custom bespoke update and sync solution considering the differences between on-line and off-line use cases.
Artifact: AWS Artifact is a central resource for compliance-related information such as Service Organization Control (SOC) reports, Payment Card Industry (PCI) reports, and certifications from accreditation bodies, among others.
Athena: Amazon Athena is an serverless, interactive query service to analyse data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL.
Application Discovery Service: AWS Application Discovery Service gathers information on-premises data centres to plan the migration of their deployed resources to AWS.
Availability Zone: An Availability Zone, in AWS, is a Data Centre that does not share any common single point of failure (e.g. power supply, network, etc.) with other Availability Zones.
Batch: Batch is an AWS capability for running long-lived batch processes that free up resources (and thus cost) once completed.
Certificate Manager: AWS Certificate Manager provisions and deploys public and private (SSL/TLS) certificates for use with AWS services and internal connected resources.
Chime: Amazon Chime is a video and audio conference system similar to WebEx or Zoom.
Cloud 9: Cloud 9 is a cloud/web-browser based IDE. Its main benefit is that it is integrated with Lambda and its supported languages so that the entire SDLC can take place entirely in the cloud.
CloudFormation: AWS CloudFormation is a solution to orchestrate resources (e.g. scaling) using a declarative approach. In essence, CloudFormation is Amazon’s realisation of the Infrastructure as Code paradigm.
CloudFront: Amazon CloudFront is AWS’ de facto CDN and is available at numerous edge locations across the world.
CloudHSM: AWS CloudHSM is a cloud-based hardware security module (HSM) to generate encryption keys. It integrates with industry-standard APIs, such as PKCS#11, Java Cryptography Extensions (JCE), and Microsoft CryptoNG (CNG) libraries.
CloudSearch: Amazon CloudSearch is a text search solution for one’s website or application.
CloudTrail: AWS CloudTrail is a service to track and audit the activities of users for governance, compliance, and auditing purposes.
CloudWatch: Amazon CloudWatch is AWS’ de facto monitoring and management solution that is highly integrated with all of its services.
CodeBuild: AWS CloudBuild is a continuous integration solution.
CodeCommit: AWS CodeCommit is a SCM solution based on private Git repositories.
CodeDeploy: AWS Deploy is a solution to automate deployments to compute platforms such as EC2, Lambda and so on.
CodePipeline: AWS CodePipeline is a continuous delivery solution.
CodeStar: AWS CodeStar is a solution to manage, develop, build and deploy applications.
Cognito: Amazon Cognito provides user sign-up, sign-in, and access control web and mobile application. It supports social identity providers, such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon, and enterprise identity providers via SAML 2.0.
Connect: Amazon Connect helps businesses create an end-to-end customer service capability including contact flows, telephony integration, human and non-human touch points, among others.
Comprehend: Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NPL) service.
Config: AWS Config tracks changes in resource configurations and also allows to enforce compliance against desired target ones.
Data Pipeline: AWS Data Pipeline is a web service to process and move data between different AWS compute and storage services, as well as on-premises data sources, at specified intervals.
Database Migration Service: AWS Database Migration service provides a homogenous (e.g. Oracle to Oracle) as well as heterogeneous (Oracle to Aurora) migration solution using a hot mechanisms. The solution may also be used for disaster recovery/high availability purposes.
Deeplens: AWS DeepLens is a computer vision (deep learning, model training, etc.) service.
Device Farm: AWS Device Farm is a service to test and interact with Android, iOS, and web apps on many devices at once, or reproduce issues on a device in real time.
Direct Connect: Amazon Direct Connect is a solution to integrate an on-premise network with AWS.
Dynamo DB: Amazon DynamoDB is a managed NoSQL database service that supports key-value and document data structures.
Directory Service: AWS Directory Service is, essentially, Microsoft Active Directory on a managed basis with built-in integration with AWS products.
EC2: Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is how AWS refers to their virtualisation capabilities.
Edge Location: An Edge Location is an endpoint that AWS uses for caching content (as of today using CloudFront’s CDN capabilities). There are more Edge Locations than regions since a tiny subset of AWS infrastructure is required to support CDN capabilities.
EFS: Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) is a scalable file system implemented as NAS whose volumes can be mounted concurrently on multiple compute instances.
Elasticache: Amazon ElastiCache is a set of in memory data store and cache service that includes the likes of Memcached and Redis.
Elastic Beanstalk: Elastic Beanstalk is a PaaS offered by Amazon that is similar to Heroku in the sense that developers push high-level code assemblies (e.g. JAR files) and do not need to be concerned with the underlying application server and virtualisation infrastructure.
Elasticsearch Service: Amazon Elasticsearch offers the popular open source text search engine on a managed basis together with the other ELK stack tools.
Elastic Transcoder: Amazon Elastic Transcoder is a scalable media (audio and video) encoding/decoding service.
EMR: Amazon EMR provides BigData frameworks such as Hadoop, Apache Spark, HBase, Presto, and Flink in a managed basis. It is setup to interact with data stored in S3 and DynamoDB out-of-the-box.
FreeRTOS: Amazon FreeRTOS is an operating system for low-power microcontrollers based on the open source operating system of the same name.
GameLift: Amazon GameLift is a platform to run multi-player game server backend software. It integrates with the likes of Unreal and Unity but also provides support for bespoke programming.
GuardDuty: Amazon GuardDuty is a paid threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious or unauthorized behaviour (e.g. unusual API calls) to help protect AWS accounts and workloads.
Glacier: Amazon Glacier is a durable, low-cost cloud storage service for data archiving and long-term backup.
Glue: AWS Glue is a managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service.
Greengrass: AWS Greengrass is a solution to develop IoT software with emphasis on the ability of pushing new releases from the cloud whilst letting devices work off-line without a constant connection to the cloud once updated.
IAM: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) allows configuring access security (users, group, permissions, etc.) for AWS services and resources.
Inspector: Amazon Inspector is an agent-based security solution that automatically assesses applications for vulnerabilities or deviations from best practices.
IOT Device Management: AWS IoT Device Management helps onboard, organise, and monitor, remote IoT devices.
Kinesis: Amazon Kinesis is a real-time collection, processing, and analysis solution for video and data streams.
Kinesis Video Streams: Kinesis Video Streams automatically provisions and elastically the infrastructure required to ingest and process streaming video data from, according to Amazon, millions of devices.
Lambda: Lambda is the name given by Amazon to their Function as a Service (FaaS) offering.
Lex: Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces (namely chatbots).
Lightsail: Lightsail may be thought as AWS’ response to traditional fixed-price virtual server offerings such as those provided by the likes of Digital Ocean. Underneath, the same EC2 infrastructure is used but management and billing are simpler.
Macie: Amazon Macie automatically discovers sensitive data, such as personally identifiable information (PII), stored in S3 buckets.
Managed Services: AWS Managed Services is an ITIL-based operations management (change control, monitoring, patch management, security, backup, etc.) service.
Migration Hub: AWS Migration Hub helps track the progress of application migrations across multiple AWS and partner solutions.
Mobile: AMS Mobile is an accelerator to provide AWS capabilities to mobile applications using iOS, Android, Web, and React Native platforms.
MQ: Amazon MQ is Apache ActiveMQ on a managed basis.
OpsWorks: AWS OpsWorks is essentially a managed Chef or Puppet solution.
Pinpoint: Amazon Pinpoint provides email, SMS, and mobile push message capabilities.
Polly: Amazon Polly is a text-to-speech service that aims to achieve human-like voice.
QuickSight: Amazon QuickSight is Business Intelligence (BI) service to build visualizations and perform ad-hoc analysis from data.
RDS: Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is a set of managed database services that includes Amazon’s own flagship Aurora solution as well as market favourites such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server and so on.
Red Shift: Amazon Redshift is a data warehousing solution (analytics, business intelligence, etc) for big data sets stored using a column-oriented DBMS principle. Its current implementation is based on PostgreSQL.
Region: A Region is a geographical location (typically a city such as London) in which AWS deploys infrastructure within two or more Availability Zones.
Rekognition: Amazon Rekognition provides out-of-the-box image and video analysis (identification of text, people, objects, etc.) capabilities.
Route 53: Amazon Route 53 is AWS’ de facto DNS service.
S3: Amazon S3 is a the de facto blob storage solution in AWS. Volumes in S3 are called Buckets.
SageMaker: Amazon SageMaker is a managed machine learning (ML) solution offering frameworks such as MXNet, TensorFlow, and Chainer, among others.
SAM: The Amazon Serverless Application Model (SAM) allows defining complete serverless applications (e.g. DynamoDB tables, APIs, etc.) in a declarative manner. It is an extension to CloudFormation.
Server Migration Service: AWS Server Migration Service is an agentless solution to replicate live server volumes and create Amazon Machine Images (AMI). It is, essentially, a compute migration tool.
Service Catalogue: AWS Service Catalogue allows to group and manage AWS resources using the Service Catalogue paradigm used in IT Service Management.
Shield: AWS Shield is a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service that is enabled by default in a standard form. Fore more advanced use cases, Amazon offers an advanced billable version.
Step Functions: AWS Step Functions helps organise AWS Lambda functions as a state machine-based, pictorial workflow. This helps provide a share business process view among different stakeholders.
Storage Gateway: Amazon Storage Gateway is a solution that allows replicating files to Amazon storage (S3, Glacier, EBS) by means of an appliance that customers deploy on premise.
Snowball: Amazon Snowball is a service to get data in and out of AWS by means of a physical, encrypted storage device that is shipped to customers. It is also bundled with a file transfer utility since the encryption mechanism does not allow interacting directly with the hardware.
SQS: Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a message queuing service. It comes in two versions: standard and FIFO. The standard version provides high-throughput but does not guarantee order and messages may be, occasionally, delivered more than once. The FIFO version, instead, guarantees that messages are processed exactly once (and in order) and in exchange for lower throughput.
SES: Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is an email sending capability that offers both SMTP and API invocation routes.
SNS: Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a pub/sub messaging and mobile notifications service for coordinating the delivery of messages to subscribing endpoints and clients.
SWF: Amazon Simple Workflow (SWF) helps build, run, and scale background jobs that have parallel or sequential steps. It is more appropriate for non-Lambda use cases.
Systems Manager: AWS Systems Manager is primarily an Ops monitoring and governance tool for compute and storage resources.
Transcribe: Amazon is a speech recognition (speech-to-text) service.
Translate: Amazon Translate provides language translation capabilities using a neural network machine.
Trusted Advisor: AWS Trusted Advisor is a solution that analyses one’s AWS environment to provide recommendations in terms of cost optimisation, performance, security, fault tolerance, and service limits.
VPC: Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is AWS’ capability to configure custom (and potentially segregated) logical networks including IP ranges, subnets, route tables and so on.
WAF: AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a HTTP-level application firewall to protect applications from attacks such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting.
WorkDocs: Amazon WorkDocs is a cloud document storage solution similar to Dropbox.
WorkMail: Amazon WorkMail is a email and calendar solution similar to Outlook 365 or Google Mail/Calendar that offers both a web-based interface and fat client support (i.e. IMAP.)
WorkSpaces: Amazon WorkSpaces is a remote desktop solution (VDI) that supports both Windows and Linux.
X-Ray: AWS X-Ray is an application introspection (i.e. debugging) solution with tracing capabilities for distributed applications.