Glossary

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AMI

A template of snapshots and settings used to launch instances.

Auto Scaling

Automatically adds or removes instances to match demand.

Availability Zone

One or more isolated data centres within a region.

Bucket

A named container for objects in S3.

CDN

A network of edge servers that cache content close to users.

EBS

Network-attached block storage volumes for instances.

EC2

The AWS service for virtual servers.

Edge location

A data centre that serves cached content near users.

Elasticity

Scaling resources up and down automatically with demand.

Health check

A periodic test a load balancer uses to detect failed targets.

IaaS

Infrastructure as a Service: rent virtual machines, storage and networks.

Instance type

The CPU and memory size of an EC2 instance.

Key pair

A public/private key pair used to access instances.

Load balancer

Distributes incoming requests across several targets.

Object

A file plus metadata stored in a bucket.

PaaS

Platform as a Service: deploy apps without managing servers.

Region

A geographic area containing several availability zones.

Scalability

The ability to handle more load by adding resources.

Security group

A stateful firewall attached to instances.

Snapshot

A point-in-time backup of an EBS volume.

Static website

A site made only of files served as-is, with no backend.

Subnet

A range of IP addresses inside a VPC, in one zone.

Terminate

Permanently delete an instance.

VPC

An isolated virtual network in the cloud.