AWS Cloud Foundations

Cloud Computing

On-demand IT resources (servers, storage, databases, networking) delivered over the internet, pay-as-you-go.

CapEx (Capital Expenditure)

Upfront costs of buying/owning hardware.

OpEx (Operational Expenditure)

Ongoing costs of renting services in a cloud model.

Region

Geographical area containing multiple Availability Zones.

Availability Zone (AZ)

A separate, independent data center inside a region.

Edge Location

Local site that caches content used by CloudFront for fast delivery.

EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)

AWSs virtual servers; choose instance type based on CPU, memory, or GPU.

Lambda

AWSs serverless compute; runs code in response to events without managing servers.

S3 (Simple Storage Service)

Object storage for files (objects) in buckets.

EBS (Elastic Block Store)

Block storage like a hard drive, attached to EC2 instances.

Glacier

Archival storage for rarely accessed data, cold storage.

Bucket

Container in S3 that holds objects (files + metadata + unique key).

RDS (Relational Database Service)

Managed SQL databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, etc.).

DynamoDB

Fully managed NoSQL database, key-value/document style, scales automatically.

VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)

Isolated private network in AWS where you control subnets, firewalls, routing.

Route 53

AWSs Domain Name System DNS service; translates names into IP addresses.

CloudFront

Content Delivery Network CDN that delivers cached content through edge locations.

IAM (Identity and Access Management)

AWS service to manage who can do what.

User

An individual account with credentials.

Group

A collection of users with shared permissions.

Role

A temporary identity often assumed by applications or services.

Policy

A JSON document defining permissions, such as allowed read-only access to S3.

Shared Responsibility Model

AWS secures the infrastructure; you secure your data, applications, and access.

Least Privilege

Security principle of granting only the permissions absolutely necessary.

Pay-as-you-go

Billing model where you pay only for what you use.

Free Tier

Limited-use option to test AWS services at no cost.

Cost Explorer

Tool for analyzing AWS spending.

Trusted Advisor

Tool for cost, security, and performance optimization.

SageMaker

AWSs managed machine learning platform that runs on EC2 and stores data in S3.

Bedrock

AWS service for accessing large language models via managed endpoints.