As you continue to learn more about Amazon Web Services (AWS) and study for your AWS certification exam, the assault of AWS terminology and the curiosity behind why everything is prefixed with “cloud” or “elastic” can be a bit overwhelming. To help you out, we have compiled a glossary-style cheat sheet with common terms and phrases you will come across as you dive deeper into the world of AWS.

AWS IoT: AWS IoT is a managed cloud service that lets connected devices easily and securely interact with cloud applic­ations and other devices.

Certif­icate Manager: AWS Certif­icate Manager lets you easily provision, manage, and deploy Secure Sockets Layer/­Tra­nsport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certif­icates for use with AWS services.

CloudF­orm­ation: AWS CloudF­orm­ation lets you create and update a collection of related AWS resources in a predic­table fashion.

CloudFront: Amazon CloudFront provides a way to distribute content to end users with low latency and high data transfer speeds.

CloudS­earch: AWS CloudS­earch is a fully managed search service for websites and apps.

CloudTrail: AWS CloudTrail provides increased visibility into user activity by recording API calls made on your account.

Data Pipeline: AWS Data Pipeline is a lightw­eight orches­tration service for periodic, data-d­riven workflows.

DMS: AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) helps you migrate databases to the cloud easily and securely while minimizing downtime.

DynamoDB: Amazon DynamoDB is a scalable NoSQL data store that manages distri­buted replicas of your data for high availa­bility.

EC2: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud.

EC2 Container Service: Amazon ECS allows you to easily run and manage Docker containers across a cluster of Amazon EC2 instances.

Elastic Beanstalk: AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an applic­ation container for deploying and managing applic­ations.

Elasti­Cache: Amazon Elasti­Cache improves applic­ation perfor­mance by allowing you to retrieve inform­ation from an in-memory caching system.

Elastic File System: Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is a file storage service for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances.

Elasti­csearch Service: Amazon Elasti­csearch Service is a managed service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale Elasti­cse­arch, a popular open-s­ource search and analytics engine.

Elastic Transcoder: Amazon Elastic Transcoder lets you convert your media files in the cloud easily, at low cost, and at scale

EMR: Amazon Elastic MapReduce lets you perform big data tasks such as web indexing, data mining, and log file analysis.

Glacier: Amazon Glacier is a low-cost storage service that provides secure and durable storage for data archiving and backup.

IAM: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) lets you securely control access to AWS services and resources.

Inspector: Amazon Inspector enables you to analyze the behavior of the applic­ations you run in AWS and helps you to identify potential security issues.

Kinesis: Amazon Kinesis services make it easy to work with real-time streaming data in the AWS cloud.

Lambda: AWS Lambda is a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automa­tically manages the compute resources for you.

Machine Learning: Amazon Machine Learning is a service that enables you to easily build smart applic­ations.

OpsWorks: AWS OpsWorks is a DevOps platform for managing applic­ations of any scale or complexity on the AWS cloud.

RDS: Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale familiar relational databases in the cloud.

Redshift: Amazon Redshift is a fast, fully managed, petaby­te-­scale data warehouse that makes it cost-e­ffe­ctive to analyze all your data using your existing business intell­igence tools.

Route 53: Amazon Route 53 is a scalable and highly available Domain Name System (DNS) and Domain Name Regist­ration service.

SES: Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) enables you to send and receive email.

SNS: Amazon Simple Notifi­cation Service (SNS) lets you publish messages to subscr­ibers or other applic­ations.

Storage Gateway: AWS Storage Gateway securely integrates on-pre­mises IT enviro­nments with cloud storage for backup and disaster recovery.

SQS: Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) offers a reliable, highly scalable, hosted queue for storing messages.

SWF: Amazon Simple Workflow (SWF) coordi­nates all of the processing steps within an applic­ation.

S3: Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data.

VPC: Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) lets you launch AWS resources in a private, isolated cloud.