AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Glossary

Definitions and pro-tips for the CLF-C02 certification.

A

Amazon AppStream 2.0

Amazon AppStream 2.0 is a fully managed non-persistent application streaming service that allows users to access desktop applications through a web browser. It streams the application interface to the user without installing software locally.

Amazon Aurora

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database engine built for the cloud. It provides the performance and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open-source databases, featuring automatic scaling and replication.

Amazon Bedrock

Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service that makes foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies available via an API. It allows developers to build and scale generative AI applications without managing the underlying infrastructure.

Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront is a globally distributed content delivery network (CDN) service designed to accelerate the delivery of static and dynamic web content. It caches data at strategically located edge locations, reducing latency and improving performance for end-users worldwide, enhancing application responsiveness.

Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service providing metrics, logs, and alarms for AWS resources and applications. It enables real-time monitoring of performance, resource utilization, and operational health, facilitating proactive identification and resolution of issues within the AWS environment.

Amazon Cognito

Amazon Cognito provides authentication, authorization, and user management for web and mobile applications. It allows users to sign in using a password or social identity providers and manages user profiles and access tokens.

Amazon DynamoDB

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed, serverless NoSQL database service providing fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability. It supports both key-value and document data models, offering high availability and automatic replication across multiple Availability Zones for data durability.

Amazon EBS

Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) provides persistent block storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances. These volumes act as virtual hard drives, offering various types optimized for different workloads, including general purpose, throughput, and IOPS intensive applications. Data is preserved when the EC2 instance is stopped.

Amazon EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides scalable compute capacity in the AWS cloud. It allows users to rent virtual machines (instances) with various operating systems, storage, networking, and security configurations. EC2 supports diverse workloads, from web servers to high-performance computing.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is a highly scalable, high-performance container orchestration service that supports Docker containers. It allows you to run and scale containerized applications on AWS without having to install or operate your own orchestration software.

Amazon Elastic File System (EFS)

Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) is a scalable, fully managed network file system (NFS) that allows multiple EC2 instances to access the same data simultaneously. It provides a shared storage solution that grows and shrinks automatically as you add or remove files.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is a managed service that makes it easy to run Kubernetes on AWS without needing to install or operate your own Kubernetes control plane. It provides a standardized way to deploy and scale containerized applications.

Amazon ElastiCache

Amazon ElastiCache is a fully managed in-memory caching service that supports Redis and Memcached. It improves application performance by allowing you to retrieve data from fast, managed in-memory caches instead of relying solely on slower disk-based databases.

Amazon EventBridge

Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus that makes it easy to connect applications using data from your own apps, SaaS applications, and AWS services. It enables event-driven architectures by routing events to targets such as AWS Lambda, SQS, or Step Functions.

Amazon GuardDuty

Amazon GuardDuty is a continuous threat detection service that intelligently monitors for malicious activity and unauthorized behavior. It analyzes CloudTrail event logs, VPC Flow Logs, and DNS logs using machine learning and threat intelligence feeds to identify potential security threats.

Amazon Kinesis

Amazon Kinesis is a scalable and fully managed real-time data streaming service. It allows you to collect, process, and analyze real-time, streaming data from hundreds of thousands of sources, such as social media feeds or website clickstreams.

Amazon Macie

Amazon Macie is a fully managed data security service that uses machine learning to discover, classify, and protect sensitive data stored in Amazon S3. It automatically identifies Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and other sensitive data types, helping organizations meet compliance requirements and prevent data breaches.

Amazon OpenSearch Service

Amazon OpenSearch Service is a managed service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale OpenSearch clusters in the AWS Cloud. It is primarily used for real-time application monitoring, log analytics, and full-text search.

Amazon RDS

Amazon Relational Database Service simplifies relational database setup, operation, and scaling in the AWS cloud. It automates administrative tasks like patching, backup, and recovery, supporting multiple database engines. RDS offers options for both on-demand and reserved instance pricing models for cost optimization.

Amazon Redshift

Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service used for complex analytical queries. It utilizes columnar storage and parallel processing to deliver fast query performance for massive datasets, making it ideal for Business Intelligence (BI) and reporting.

Amazon Route 53

Amazon Route 53 is a scalable and highly available cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It translates human-readable domain names into the IP addresses required to access AWS resources and applications, supporting a variety of routing policies for increased reliability and performance.

Amazon S3

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is a highly scalable, durable, and secure object storage service. It stores data as objects within buckets, offering 99.999999999% (11 nines) durability. S3 is ideal for data backup, archiving, content distribution, and application data storage.

Amazon S3 Glacier

Amazon S3 Glacier is a secure, durable, and low-cost storage class for data archiving and long-term backup. It is designed for data that is rarely accessed and allows for different retrieval options based on urgency.

Amazon SageMaker

Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that provides developers and data scientists with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly. It removes the heavy lifting from each step of the ML lifecycle.

Amazon SNS

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a fully managed pub/sub messaging service enabling application-to-application (A2A) and application-to-person (A2P) communication. It allows you to send notifications via various protocols, including email, SMS, and mobile push notifications, facilitating event-driven architectures.

Amazon SQS

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fully managed message queuing service. It facilitates decoupling application components, improving scalability and resilience. SQS enables asynchronous communication by storing messages until processed, ensuring reliable message delivery without requiring producers and consumers to be available simultaneously.

Amazon VPC

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) allows you to create a logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud where you can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define. You have complete control over your virtual networking environment, including IP address ranges, subnets, route tables, and network gateways.

Amazon VPC Network Access Control Lists (NACLs)

Amazon VPC Network Access Control Lists (NACLs) are an optional layer of security for your VPC that acts as a firewall for controlling traffic in and out of one or more subnets. Unlike security groups, NACLs are stateless.

Amazon VPC Security Groups

Amazon VPC Security Groups act as a virtual firewall for your EC2 instances to control inbound and outbound traffic. They operate at the instance level and are stateful, meaning return traffic is automatically allowed regardless of inbound rules.

Amazon WorkSpaces

Amazon WorkSpaces is a fully managed, secure Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution that provides users with a persistent virtual desktop in the cloud. Users can access their dedicated Windows or Linux desktop from any supported device.

API Gateway

API Gateway is a fully managed service that facilitates the creation, publication, maintenance, monitoring, and security of APIs at scale. It acts as a reverse proxy, handling tasks like authentication, authorization, rate limiting, and request transformation, enabling secure access to backend services.

Auto Scaling

Auto Scaling automatically adjusts the number of EC2 instances in your AWS account to maintain application availability and respond to changes in demand. It monitors application performance metrics and dynamically scales capacity by adding or removing instances based on defined policies and thresholds.

Availability Zone (AZ)

An Availability Zone is a physically distinct location within an AWS Region. Each AZ is isolated from failures in other AZs, providing fault tolerance. They are connected by low-latency networks, enabling high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity for applications requiring high availability.

AWS Application Discovery Service

AWS Application Discovery Service helps enterprises plan migration projects by gathering information about their on-premises data centers. It collects server utilization and dependency data to help determine the best migration strategy and right-size resources for each application.

AWS Artifact

AWS Artifact is a service providing on-demand access to AWS’s compliance reports and certifications. It delivers pre-configured, auditable reports like SOC, PCI DSS, ISO, and HIPAA, simplifying the compliance process for AWS customers and enabling them to meet regulatory requirements.

AWS Athena

AWS Athena is an interactive query service that enables analysis of data directly in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. It is serverless, requiring no infrastructure management, and charges per query, making it cost-effective for ad-hoc data exploration and analysis of large datasets.

AWS Backup

AWS Backup is a fully managed backup service that centralizes and automates the backup of data across various AWS services. It allows you to create backup policies and schedules to ensure data durability and compliance across multiple AWS accounts and regions.

AWS Budgets

AWS Budgets enables cost management by allowing users to define spending limits and receive notifications when actual or forecasted AWS costs exceed those defined thresholds. Budgets support cost, usage, and reservation scenarios, providing granular control over cloud expenditure.

AWS CLI

The AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) is a unified tool enabling interaction with AWS services through command-line commands. It facilitates scripting, task automation, and integration with other development tools, offering programmatic control over AWS resources.

AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF)

The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) provides guidance and best practices to help organizations migrate to the cloud by identifying gaps in their current capabilities. It organizes guidance into six perspectives: Business, People, Governance, Platform, Security, and Operations.

AWS CloudFormation

AWS CloudFormation is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) service enabling you to model and provision AWS resources using declarative template files. These templates, written in JSON or YAML, define your infrastructure, automating creation, updates, and deletion for consistent and repeatable deployments.

AWS CloudTrail

AWS CloudTrail records API calls made to your AWS account, providing an audit trail of user activity and changes to AWS resources. This service enables security analysis, resource change tracking, and compliance auditing, helping to identify and investigate potential security incidents.

AWS Compute Optimizer

AWS Compute Optimizer uses machine learning to analyze historical utilization metrics and recommend optimal AWS resources. It helps you reduce costs and improve performance by suggesting the right instance types or sizes for your specific workloads.

AWS Config

AWS Config is a service that enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources. It continuously monitors and records resource configuration changes, allowing you to track compliance against desired settings over time.

AWS Control Tower

AWS Control Tower is a service that provides the easiest way to set up and govern a secure, multi-account AWS environment. It automates the creation of a landing zone based on best practices to ensure consistent governance and compliance.

AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR)

AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) is the most comprehensive set of AWS cost and usage data available. It delivers detailed CSV or Parquet files to an S3 bucket, allowing for granular analysis of spending at the hourly or daily level.

AWS Cost Explorer

AWS Cost Explorer is a tool that enables you to visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time. It provides a graphical interface to analyze spending patterns and forecast future costs based on historical data to help optimize cloud budgets.

AWS Database Migration Service (DMS)

AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) is a managed service that helps you migrate databases to AWS quickly and securely. The source database remains fully operational during the migration, minimizing downtime for the application.

AWS Edge Locations

AWS Edge Locations are specialized data centers located in major cities worldwide that are used by Amazon CloudFront to cache content closer to end-users. This reduces latency by delivering data from the nearest edge site.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering simplifying web application and service deployment. It automatically handles capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring, allowing developers to focus on code rather than infrastructure management.

AWS Fargate

AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers that works with both Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS. It eliminates the need to provision and manage servers, allowing you to specify and run containers without managing the underlying EC2 instances.

AWS Global Accelerator

AWS Global Accelerator is a networking service that improves the availability and performance of your applications with global users. It uses the AWS global network to route traffic to the optimal regional endpoint, reducing latency and jitter.

AWS Glue

AWS Glue is a fully managed ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) service designed to discover, prepare, and integrate data for analytics. It provides a data catalog, automatically detects schemas, and generates ETL code, simplifying data preparation for data warehouses and analytics applications.

AWS Health Dashboard

AWS Health Dashboard provides personalized alerts and remediation guidance when AWS is experiencing events that may impact your specific environment. It allows you to monitor the status of all AWS services and the health of your own account resources.

AWS IAM

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) provides secure control of access to AWS services and resources. IAM enables you to create and manage users, groups, and roles, and to define granular permissions using policies. It is fundamental to enforcing the principle of least privilege and securing your AWS environment.

AWS Inspector

AWS Inspector is an automated vulnerability management service that continually scans AWS workloads for software vulnerabilities and unintended network exposure. It helps improve security and compliance by providing a detailed list of security findings and remediation steps.

AWS Key Management Service (KMS)

AWS Key Management Service (KMS) is a managed service that facilitates the creation and control of cryptographic keys used for encrypting data. It supports symmetric and asymmetric encryption, allowing you to generate, store, and manage keys used with other AWS services and your applications.

AWS Lake Formation

AWS Lake Formation is a service that makes it easy to set up a secure data lake in days. It simplifies the process of ingesting, cleaning, and cataloging data, providing a central place to manage security and access controls.

AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that executes code in response to events without requiring server management. Developers upload code as functions, and Lambda automatically scales and manages the infrastructure. Billing is based on the number of requests and execution duration, offering a pay-per-use model.

AWS Lightsail

AWS Lightsail is an easy-to-use cloud platform that provides everything needed to launch and manage a virtual private server (VPS). It bundles compute, storage, and networking into a simplified interface with a predictable monthly price for small-scale projects.

AWS Management Console

The AWS Management Console is a web-based graphical user interface (GUI) providing access to AWS services. It allows users to provision, configure, and manage AWS resources without requiring command-line expertise or coding, serving as a primary entry point for cloud administration.

AWS Marketplace

AWS Marketplace is a curated digital catalog offering software, services, and data products from third-party vendors. It streamlines the procurement and deployment of solutions compatible with AWS, eliminating complex contract negotiations and simplifying software management.

AWS Migration Hub

AWS Migration Hub provides a single location to track the progress of application migrations across multiple AWS and partner tools. It allows organizations to monitor the status of their migration portfolio and coordinate efforts across different teams.

AWS Organizations

AWS Organizations enables centralized management and governance of multiple AWS accounts. It facilitates policy creation, resource grouping, and consolidated billing across an organization, improving security and cost control as AWS usage scales. It’s foundational for enterprise-level cloud deployments.

AWS Outposts

AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to virtually any data center, co-location space, or on-premises facility. It allows you to run AWS services locally for low-latency applications.

AWS Pricing Calculator

The AWS Pricing Calculator is a web-based planning tool used to estimate the cost of AWS services based on your expected usage. It allows users to model their architecture and calculate monthly costs before deploying resources to ensure budget alignment.

AWS PrivateLink

AWS PrivateLink provides private connectivity between VPCs, AWS services, and on-premises networks, without exposing traffic to the public internet. It uses interface VPC endpoints to keep network traffic within the AWS network backbone.

AWS Professional Services

AWS Professional Services delivers specialized consulting, implementation, and training services to assist customers with complex cloud adoption initiatives. They provide expertise in areas like migration, security, and application modernization, accelerating cloud transformation.

AWS QuickSight

AWS QuickSight is a cloud-native, business intelligence (BI) service providing fast, scalable, and embedded analytics capabilities. It allows users to create interactive dashboards and visualizations from various data sources, enabling data-driven decision-making and business insights.

AWS Resource Groups

AWS Resource Groups make it easier to organize and manage a collection of resources that share common characteristics. By grouping resources using tags, you can manage them as a single unit for monitoring, automation, and operational tasks.

AWS SDK

AWS Software Development Kits (SDKs) are libraries and tools that allow developers to programmatically access AWS services from various programming languages like Python, Java, and JavaScript. They enable integration of AWS functionality into custom applications and automated workflows.

AWS Secrets Manager

AWS Secrets Manager is a service used to rotate, manage, and retrieve database credentials, API keys, and other secrets. It eliminates the need to hardcode sensitive information in application code, enhancing security through automatic secret rotation and integration with KMS.

AWS Service Catalog

AWS Service Catalog allows organizations to create and manage catalogs of IT services that are approved for use on AWS. It enables centralized control over which services are available to users, ensuring compliance and standardization across the organization.

AWS Shared Responsibility Model

AWS Shared Responsibility Model is a security framework that delineates the obligations of AWS and the customer. AWS is responsible for the security 'of' the cloud, including hardware and global infrastructure, while the customer is responsible for security 'in' the cloud, such as data and IAM.

AWS Shield

AWS Shield is a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service designed to mitigate attacks targeting applications running on AWS. Shield Standard is automatically enabled for all AWS customers, while Shield Advanced provides enhanced protection and 24/7 access to the DDoS Response Team.

AWS Snow Family

The AWS Snow Family provides secure, portable devices for transferring large datasets into and out of AWS. Snowcone is for edge computing and smaller transfers, Snowball is for terabyte-scale data, and Snowmobile is an exabyte-scale data transfer service utilizing a physically transported storage appliance.

AWS Snowball

AWS Snowball is a physical data transport service for moving large datasets (petabytes) into and out of AWS. It utilizes secure, ruggedized appliances shipped to your location, offering a cost-effective alternative to internet-based data transfer when network bandwidth is limited or transfer times are prohibitive.

AWS Step Functions

AWS Step Functions is a serverless orchestration service enabling the coordination of multiple AWS services. It allows developers to build and execute state machines, defining workflows as code, to automate complex application processes without managing servers or infrastructure.

AWS Support

AWS Support provides technical assistance, architectural guidance, and access to resources for AWS customers. It offers various support tiers, each providing different response times, support channels, and access to AWS technical account managers.

AWS Support Plans

AWS Support Plans are tiered service levels (Basic, Developer, Business, and Enterprise) that provide varying degrees of technical support, response times, and account management. They ensure that customers have the necessary help to maintain their cloud environments.

AWS Systems Manager

AWS Systems Manager is a management service that provides a unified interface to view and control your AWS infrastructure. It allows you to automate operational tasks, manage patches, and configure software across a fleet of virtual machines and on-premises servers.

AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store

AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store provides secure, hierarchical storage for configuration data management and secrets management. It allows you to store parameters and secrets centrally and reference them in your applications or scripts.

AWS Training and Certification

AWS Training and Certification offers a comprehensive suite of learning resources, including digital courses, classroom training, and industry-recognized certifications. These programs are designed to validate cloud skills and expertise across various AWS services and roles.

AWS Transit Gateway

AWS Transit Gateway is a network transit hub that simplifies network topology by connecting multiple VPCs and on-premises networks. It acts as a central hub, reducing the number of peering connections required to manage complex network environments.

AWS Trusted Advisor

AWS Trusted Advisor is an online tool analyzing your AWS infrastructure against best practices. It provides recommendations across five categories: Cost Optimization, Performance Improvement, Security Checks, Fault Tolerance, and Service Limits, helping to reduce risks and improve efficiency.

AWS WAF

AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) protects web applications and APIs from common web exploits, such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS). It operates by inspecting HTTP(S) traffic and blocking malicious requests based on configurable rules and conditions, enhancing application security.

AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF)

AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a web application firewall that helps protect web applications from common web exploits. It allows you to control traffic by creating security rules that block common attack patterns, such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting (XSS).

AWS Well-Architected Framework

AWS Well-Architected Framework is a set of design principles used to evaluate and improve cloud architectures. It consists of six pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability, ensuring workloads are optimized for the cloud environment.

AWS X-Ray

AWS X-Ray helps developers analyze and debug distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture. It provides a service map that visualizes requests as they travel through various AWS services and dependencies.