Plain-English definitions of the core AWS terms for SAA-C03 study. Simplified for learning; the AWS documentation is authoritative.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Region | A geographic area containing multiple Availability Zones. |
| Availability Zone (AZ) | One or more isolated data centres within a Region. |
| VPC | Virtual Private Cloud — your isolated private network in AWS. |
| Subnet | A range of IPs in a VPC; public (internet-facing) or private. |
| Security group | A stateful virtual firewall for instances. |
| NACL | Network ACL — a stateless subnet-level firewall. |
| IAM | Identity and Access Management — users, roles and policies. |
| IAM role | Temporary credentials assumed by services or users. |
| EC2 | Elastic Compute Cloud — virtual servers. |
| Auto Scaling | Automatically adjusts capacity to demand. |
| ELB | Elastic Load Balancing — distributes traffic across targets. |
| S3 | Simple Storage Service — scalable object storage. |
| EBS | Elastic Block Store — block storage for EC2. |
| EFS | Elastic File System — shared file storage. |
| RDS | Relational Database Service — managed SQL databases. |
| DynamoDB | Managed NoSQL key-value database. |
| Lambda | Serverless functions that run code on demand. |
| CloudFront | Content delivery network (CDN). |
| Route 53 | Managed DNS and routing. |
| SQS | Simple Queue Service — decoupling via message queues. |
| SNS | Simple Notification Service — publish/subscribe messaging. |
| KMS | Key Management Service — manages encryption keys. |
| Multi-AZ | Deploying across Availability Zones for high availability. |