AWS EC2 Jargon

When it comes to Amazon Web Services, there is a lot to understand, here’s your guide to some of the jargon!

AWS: Amazon Web Services – This is Amazon’s Cloud and web service offerings, of which EC2 is one. 

EC2: Elastic Compute Cloud – This is the AWS cloud compute offering where users can pay for computing servers to test and run applications.

AMI: Amazon Machine Image – An AMI is an encrypted machine image, almost like a template of a computers root drive. They host the operating system and the applications a user chooses to run on them.

Instance:  A copy of an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) running as a virtual server in the AWS cloud.

‘Spin Up’: You might have seen articles and comments referring to users ‘spinning up’ a new server. This means they have set up a new server, so they may have paid for an AWS EC2 server and set it up to run tests of their application. 

Route 53: Route 53 is an Amazon web service used to create a new DNS service or migrate an existing DNS service to the cloud.

DNS: Domain Name System – A distributed naming system for computers, networks and servers.

GPU: Graphics Processing Unit

T2: General Purpose EC2 Server Type
M4: General Purpose EC2 Server Type
M3: General Purpose EC2 Server Type
C4: Compute Optimised EC2 Server Type
C3: Compute Optimised EC2 Server Type
R3: Memory Optimised  EC2 Server Type
G2: GPU EC2 Server Type
I2: Storage Optimised EC2 Server Type
D2: Storage Optimised EC2 Server Type

EBS: Amazon Elastic Block Store – EBS is storage for EC2 instances and are network attached. They work independently from the life of an instance.

Elastic IP Addresses:  A static IP address that you can allocate in Amazon EC2 and attach to an instance. They are known as elastic because they’re easy to allocate, attach and detach.

ELB: Elastic Load Balancing – Elastic Load Balancing splits incoming traffic between multiple EC2 instances to improve an application’s availability.

VPC: Virtual Private Cloud – An elastic network which is populated by infrastructure, platform and application services that share security and interconnection.

CloudWatch – A monitoring service for cloud services and applications in EC2. 

Auto Scaling –  The ability to be able to automatically scale your EC2 services up or down.
aws ec2 jargon infographic