Plain-English definitions of the architecture terms for AWS SA Professional study. Simplified for learning; AWS documentation is authoritative.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| AWS Organizations | Central management of multiple AWS accounts. |
| Control Tower | Sets up and governs a secure multi-account environment. |
| Service Control Policy (SCP) | Org-wide guardrails limiting what accounts can do. |
| Cross-account role | An IAM role assumed from another account for access. |
| Transit Gateway | A hub connecting many VPCs and on-premises networks. |
| Direct Connect | A dedicated private network link to AWS. |
| Landing Zone | A pre-configured, secure multi-account baseline. |
| The 7 Rs | Migration strategies: rehost, replatform, repurchase, refactor, retire, retain, relocate. |
| Application Migration Service | Lift-and-shift migration of servers to AWS. |
| DMS | Database Migration Service for moving databases. |
| Well-Architected Framework | Six pillars guiding good AWS design. |
| Disaster recovery (DR) | Strategies (backup/restore, pilot light, warm standby, multi-site) to recover from failure. |
| RTO / RPO | Recovery time and recovery point objectives. |
| Serverless | Running code/services without managing servers (Lambda, Fargate). |
| Multi-Region | Designing across AWS Regions for resilience or latency. |