Plain-English definitions of the core terms for CLF-C02 study. Simplified for learning; AWS documentation is authoritative.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Cloud computing | On-demand delivery of IT resources over the internet, pay-as-you-go. |
| Region | A geographic area with multiple Availability Zones. |
| Availability Zone | One or more isolated data centres in a Region. |
| Edge location | A site used by CloudFront to cache content near users. |
| Shared responsibility model | AWS secures the cloud; the customer secures what is in it. |
| EC2 | Virtual servers in the cloud. |
| S3 | Scalable object storage. |
| RDS | Managed relational databases. |
| VPC | Your isolated private network in AWS. |
| IAM | Identity and Access Management — users, roles, policies. |
| Lambda | Serverless functions that run code on demand. |
| Elasticity | Scaling resources up and down with demand. |
| On-Demand | Pay for compute by the second/hour with no commitment. |
| Reserved Instance | A capacity commitment for a lower price. |
| Spot Instance | Spare capacity at a deep discount, can be reclaimed. |
| Free Tier | Limited free usage for new AWS accounts. |
| CloudWatch | Monitoring and observability service. |
| CloudTrail | Records account activity and API calls. |
| Trusted Advisor | Recommends cost, security and performance improvements. |
| Total Cost of Ownership | The full cost of running workloads, on-prem vs cloud. |