AWS Definitions

This glossary explains the meaning of key words and phrases that information technology (IT) and business professionals use when discussing AWS and related software products. You can find additional definitions by visiting WhatIs.com or using the search box below.

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  • A

    Amazon AI

    Amazon AI is a set of artificial intelligence (AI) services that offer machine learning (ML) and deep learning technologies for Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers.

  • Amazon API Gateway

    Amazon API Gateway is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) feature that enables developers to connect non-AWS applications to AWS back-end resources, such as servers and code.

  • Amazon AppStream

    Amazon AppStream is an Amazon Web Service (AWS) that enables compute-intensive applications to be streamed from the cloud to computing devices of all types.

  • Amazon Athena

    Amazon Athena is a service that enables a data analyst to perform interactive queries in the web-based cloud storage service, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).

  • Amazon Aurora

    Amazon Aurora is a relational database engine from Amazon Web Services. The engine is MySQL-compatible, which means code, applications and drivers used in databases relying on MySQL can be used in Aurora with minimal or no changes.

  • Amazon Braket

    Amazon Braket is a fully managed AWS cloud service designed to allow users remote access to a single development environment for quantum computers.

  • Amazon Chime

    Amazon Chime is a real-time audio, video conferencing and collaboration service hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

  • Amazon Cognito

    Amazon Cognito is an Amazon Web Services product that controls user authentication and access for mobile applications on internet-connected devices.

  • Amazon Comprehend

    Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to analyze and find relationships in text.

  • Amazon Connect

    Amazon Connect is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud customer contact center service.

  • Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store)

    Amazon Elastic Block Store is a cloud-based block storage system provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that is best used for storing persistent data.

  • Amazon EC2 Elastic GPUs

    Amazon EC2 Elastic GPUs are virtual machines (VMs), also known as compute instances, in the Amazon Web Services public cloud with added graphics acceleration capabilities.

  • Amazon Echo

    Amazon Echo is a product line of hands-free speaker and virtual assistant devices that interact with an end user via the Amazon Alexa cloud-based voice service.

  • Amazon EFS (Elastic File System)

    Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) is a cloud-based file storage service for applications and workloads that run in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud.

  • Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

    Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a web-based service that enables businesses to run application programs in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud.

  • Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)

    Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is a cloud computing service in Amazon Web Services (AWS) that manages containers and allows developers to run applications in the cloud without having to configure an environment for the code to run in.

  • Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)

    Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is a cloud-based container management service that natively integrates with Kubernetes to deploy applications.

  • Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce)

    Amazon EMR (previously known as Amazon Elastic MapReduce) is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) tool for big data processing and analysis.

  • Amazon Glacier

    Amazon Glacier, also known as Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) Glacier, is a low-cost cloud storage service for data with longer retrieval times offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

  • Amazon GuardDuty

    Amazon GuardDuty is a managed cloud security monitoring service that detects behavior or threats that can compromise Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts, resources or workloads.

  • Amazon Inspector

    Amazon Inspector is an AWS tool that automatically assesses a customer's AWS cloud deployment for security vulnerabilities and deficiencies.

  • Amazon Lex

    Amazon Lex is an artificial intelligence (AI) web service. Lex includes natural language processing (NLP), and natural language understanding (NLU) for building conversational interfaces where users can communicate via text and speech.

  • Amazon Lightsail

    Amazon Lightsail is an Amazon cloud service that offers bundles of cloud compute power and memory for new or less experienced cloud users.

  • Amazon Machine Image (AMI)

    An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a master image for the creation of virtual servers -- known as EC2 instances -- in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment.

  • Amazon Machine Learning

    Amazon Machine Learning is an Amazon Web Services product that allows a developer to discover patterns in end-user data through algorithms, construct mathematical models based on these patterns and then create and implement predictive applications.

  • Amazon Macie

    Amazon Macie is a cloud security tool that uses machine learning to identify and protect sensitive data stored in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud.

  • Amazon Personalize

    Amazon Personalize is a low-code recommendation engine that can generate custom recommendations for any application running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure. 

  • Amazon Polly

    Amazon Polly is a text-to-speech service within the Amazon Web Services cloud platform. It uses deep learning technology to allow applications to speak with a human-like voice.

  • Amazon QuickSight

    Amazon QuickSight is a machine learning-powered business intelligence service built for the cloud under the Amazon Web Services (AWS) umbrella.

  • Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service)

    Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is a managed database service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It makes it easy to set up and operate a scalable relational database in the AWS cloud.

  • Amazon Redshift Spectrum

    Amazon Redshift Spectrum is a feature within Amazon Web Services' Redshift data warehousing service that lets a data analyst conduct fast, complex analysis on objects stored on the AWS cloud.

  • Amazon Rekognition

    Amazon Rekognition is an image analysis service available in the Amazon AI suite.

  • Amazon Resource Name (ARN)

    An Amazon Resource Name is a file naming convention used to identify a particular resource in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud.

  • Amazon S3 bucket

    An Amazon S3 bucket is a public cloud storage resource available in Amazon Web Services' (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3), an object storage offering.

  • Amazon SageMaker

    Amazon SageMaker is a managed service in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud.

  • Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)

    Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a managed message queuing service technical professionals and developers use to send, store and retrieve multiple messages of various sizes asynchronously.

  • Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)

    Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is a scalable, high-speed, web-based cloud storage service. The service is designed for online backup and archiving of data and applications on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

  • Amazon Transcribe

    Amazon Transcribe is a speech recognition service that transcribes audio files into text.

  • Amazon Translate

    Amazon Translate is a cloud service for changing large amounts of text written in one language to another language. Amazon Translate supports 25 languages, with the official documentation detailing which languages can be paired up for translation.

  • Amazon Trust Services

    Amazon Trust Services is a certificate authority created and operated by Amazon Web Services.

  • Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)

    Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) allows a developer to create a virtual network for resources in an isolated section of the Amazon Web Services cloud.

  • Amazon VPC traffic mirroring

    Traffic mirroring is a feature for Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). The feature is used to monitor the network-level traffic of workloads.

  • Amazon WorkMail

    Amazon WorkMail is a managed email and calendar service for businesses that is hosted on the Amazon Web Services public cloud.

  • Application Load Balancer

    The Application Load Balancer is a feature of Elastic Load Balancing that allows a developer to configure and route incoming end-user traffic to applications based in the AWS public cloud.

  • AWS ADS (AWS Application Discovery Service)

    AWS Application Discovery Service (AWS ADS) is a tool that helps an enterprise plan application migrations to the Amazon Web Services public cloud.

  • AWS Artifact

    AWS Artifact is a portal that provides an enterprise with access to security and compliance reports that apply to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud.

  • AWS Auto Scaling

    AWS Auto Scaling is a service that automatically monitors and adjusts compute resources to maintain performance for applications hosted in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud.

  • AWS certification

    AWS certification is a level of Amazon Web Services cloud expertise that an IT professional obtains after passing one or more exams the public cloud provider offers.

  • AWS CloudFormation (Amazon Web Services CloudFormation)

    AWS CloudFormation is a free service that provides Amazon Web Services customers with the tools they need to create and manage the infrastructure a particular software application requires to run on AWS.

  • AWS CodeStar

    AWS CodeStar is a planning and management service designed for a team of developers working on a project in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud.

  • AWS Cost Management

    AWS Cost Management is a collection of tools that provide insight into Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud cost and usage.

  • AWS Direct Connect

    Direct Connect is a network service that allows an enterprise customer to establish a dedicated network connection between one of Amazon's Direct Connect locations and the customer's data center or colocation environment. 

  • AWS Educate (Amazon Web Services Educate)

    AWS Educate is a free, online learning program that teaches students about cloud computing.

  • AWS Fargate

    AWS Fargate is a service that enables a user to run containers on Amazon's cloud computing platform without the need to manage the underlying infrastructure.

  • AWS Firewall Manager

    AWS Firewall Manager is a tool from Amazon Web Services that an organization can use to configure policies for the cloud vendor's native web application firewall (WAF) service.

  • AWS Instance Scheduler

    AWS Instance Scheduler is a tool from Amazon Web Services that automates when and where a user's virtual machine instances are deployed on the public cloud.

  • AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS)

    AWS Key Management Service (KMS) is a managed service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that allows companies to create, control and manage the cryptographic keys that encrypt and protect their data.

  • AWS Managed Services

    AWS Managed Services is a set of services and tools that automate infrastructure management tasks for Amazon Web Services (AWS) deployments.

  • AWS Management Console

    The AWS Management Console is a web-based application that lets users access the broad range of services included in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform.

  • AWS Network Load Balancer (NLB)

    AWS Network Load Balancer (NLB) is an Amazon Web Services tool that distributes high-performance traffic across multiple cloud instances and provides automatic scaling of resources to ensure low latency and high throughput for applications.

  • AWS On-Demand Instances (Amazon Web Services On-Demand Instances)

    AWS On-Demand Instances (Amazon Web Services On-Demand Instances) are virtual servers that run in AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) or AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) and are purchased at a fixed rate per hour.

  • AWS Partner Network (APN)

    The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN) is a classification endorsed by AWS for a global community of cloud service providers and vendors once they qualify for certain benchmarks.

  • AWS Reserved Instances

    AWS Reserved Instances (RIs) refer to compute capacity that can be reserved on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to take advantage of discounted pricing.

  • AWS Secrets Manager

    AWS Secrets Manager is a security service to centrally manage sensitive information and eliminate the need to hard-code that information into an application.

  • AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO)

    AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO) is a service from Amazon Web Services that enables IT to manage user access to multiple applications and AWS accounts from a single, centralized console.

  • AWS Snowball Edge

    AWS Snowball Edge is a physical appliance intended to help an enterprise migrate large volumes of data into and off of the AWS public cloud.

  • AWS Step Functions

    AWS Step Functions is a cloud service from Amazon Web Services that enables a developer to manage and visualize the components of distributed, multi-component applications.

  • What are availability zones?

    Availability zones (AZs) are isolated or separated data centers located within specific regions in which public cloud services originate and operate.

  • What is an Amazon EC2 Instance? Types, features and pricing

    An Amazon EC2 instance is a virtual server in Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) scalable compute platform for running applications on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

  • What is an AWS landing zone?

    An AWS landing zone is a scalable, secure Amazon Web Services environment that enables AWS users and organizations to launch and deploy workloads and applications in the AWS cloud.

  • What is AWS Glue?

    AWS Glue is a cloud-based and serverless data integration service that helps users to prepare data for analysis through automated extract, transform and load (ETL) processes.

  • What is AWS Lambda?

    AWS Lambda is an event-driven cloud computing service from Amazon Web Services (AWS) that allows developers to run code without having to provision, administer, or manage compute resources.

  • What is AWS Migration Hub?

    AWS Migration Hub is a service from Amazon Web Services that enables AWS users to simplify migration to the AWS public cloud.

  • What is AWS Outposts?

    AWS Outposts is a fully managed service from Amazon Web Services (AWS) that enables users to set up a hybrid cloud by extending AWS infrastructure, services, application programming interfaces (APIs) and tools to any datacenter, colocation space or on-premises facility.

  • What is AWS PrivateLink?

    AWS PrivateLink is a networking feature from Amazon Web Services (AWS) that eases and secures connectivity between AWS Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) and other services while protecting data from exposure to the internet.

  • What is AWS Serverless Application Model?

    AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) is an open source framework that helps developers create and deploy serverless applications for the AWS cloud.

  • What is AWS? Ultimate guide to Amazon Web Services

    AWS (Amazon Web Services) is a comprehensive, evolving cloud computing platform provided by Amazon. It includes a mixture of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service and packaged software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings.

  • B

    Boto

    Boto is a software development kit (SDK) designed to improve the use of the Python programming language in Amazon Web Services. The Boto project started as a customer-contributed library to help developers build Python-based applications in the cloud, converting application programming interface (API) responses from AWS into Python classes.

  • C

    AWS CloudWatch

    Amazon CloudWatch is a component of Amazon Web Services that provides monitoring for AWS resources and the customer applications running on the Amazon infrastructure.

  • F

    Firecracker

    Firecracker is a light-weight virtualization technology open sourced by Amazon Web Services.

  • S

    S3 Intelligent-Tiering

    S3 Intelligent-Tiering is an Amazon S3 storage class that analyzes an AWS user's stored data and automatically moves it between storage tiers based on usage frequency.

  • Amazon's data-flow PaaS: AppStream and Kinesis

    Learn why AppStream and Kinesis are different kinds of data flow services.