Amazon Web Services In Plain English

[luantranminh]

	Should have been called	Use this to	It's like
EC2	Amazon Virtual Servers	Host the bits of things you think of as a computer.	It's handwavy, but EC2 instances are similar to the virtual private servers you'd get at Linode, DigitalOcean or Rackspace.
IAM	Users, Keys and Certs	Set up additional users, set up new AWS Keys and policies.
S3	Amazon Unlimited FTP Server	Store images and other assets for websites. Keep backups and share files between services. Host static websites. Also, many of the other AWS services write and read from S3.
VPC	Amazon Virtual Colocated Rack	Overcome objections that "all our stuff is on the internet!" by adding an additional layer of security. Makes it appear as if all of your AWS services are on the same little network instead of being small pieces in a much bigger network.	If you're familar with networking: VLANs
Lambda	AWS App Scripts	Run little self contained snippets of JS, Java or Python to do discrete tasks. Sort of a combination of a queue and execution in one. Used for storing and then executing changes to your AWS setup or responding to events in S3 or DynamoDB. LAMBDA IN PLAIN ENGLISH
API Gateway	API Proxy	Proxy your apps API through this so you can throttle bad client traffic, test new versions, and present methods more cleanly.	3Scale
RDS	Amazon SQL	Be your app's Mysql, Postgres, and Oracle database.	Heroku Postgres
Route53	Amazon DNS + Domains	Buy a new domain and set up the DNS records for that domain.	DNSimple, GoDaddy, Gandi
SES	Amazon Transactional Email	Send one-off emails like password resets, notifications, etc. You could use it to send a newsletter if you wrote all the code, but that's not a great idea.	SendGrid, Mandrill, Postmark
Cloudfront	Amazon CDN	Make your websites load faster by spreading out static file delivery to be closer to where your users are.	MaxCDN, Akamai
CloudSearch	Amazon Fulltext Search	Pull in data on S3 or in RDS and then search it for every instance of 'Jimmy.'	Sphinx, Solr, ElasticSearch
DynamoDB	Amazon NoSQL	Be your app's massively scalable key valueish store.	MongoLab
Elasticache	Amazon Memcached	Be your app's Memcached or Redis.	Redis to Go, Memcachier
Elastic Transcoder	Amazon Beginning Cut Pro	Deal with video weirdness (change formats, compress, etc.).
SQS	Amazon Queue	Store data for future processing in a queue. The lingo for this is storing "messages" but it doesn't have anything to do with email or SMS. SQS doesn't have any logic, it's just a place to put things and take things out.	RabbitMQ, Sidekiq
WAF	AWS Firewall	Block bad requests to Cloudfront protected sites (aka stop people trying 10,000 passwords against /wp-admin)	Sophos, Kapersky
Cognito	Amazon OAuth as a Service	Give end users - (non AWS) - the ability to log in with Google, Facebook, etc.	OAuth.io
Device Farm	Amazon Drawer of Old Android Devices	Test your app on a bunch of different IOS and Android devices simultaneously.	MobileTest, iOS emulator
Mobile Analytics	Spot on Name, Amazon Product Managers take note	Track what people are doing inside of your app.	Flurry
SNS	Amazon Messenger	Send mobile notifications, emails and/or SMS messages	UrbanAirship, Twilio
CodeCommit	Amazon GitHub	Version control your code - hosted Git.	Github, BitBucket
Code Deploy	Code Deploy	Get your code from your CodeCommit repo (or Github) onto a bunch of EC2 instances in a sane way.	Heroku, Capistrano
CodePipeline	Amazon Continuous Integration	Run automated tests on your code and then do stuff with it depending on if it passes those tests.	CircleCI, Travis
EC2 Container Service	Amazon Docker as a Service	Put a Dockerfile into an EC2 instance so you can run a website.
Elastic Beanstalk	Amazon Platform as a Service	Move your app hosted on Heroku to AWS when it gets too expensive.	Heroku, BlueMix, Modulus
AppStream	Amazon Citrix	Put a copy of a Windows application on a Windows machine that people get remote access to.	Citrix, RDP
Direct Connect		Pay your Telco + AWS to get a dedicated leased line from your data center or network to AWS. Cheaper than Internet out for Data.
Data Pipeline	Amazon ETL	Extract, Transform and Load data from elsewhere in AWS. Schedule when it happens and get alerts when they fail.
Directory Service		Tie together other apps that need a Microsoft Active Directory to control them.
Elastic Map Reduce	Amazon Hadooper	Iterate over massive text files of raw data that you're keeping in S3.
Glacier	Really slow Amazon S3	Make backups of your backups that you keep on S3. Also, beware the cost of getting data back out in a hurry. For long term archiving.
Kinesis	Amazon High Throughput	Ingest lots of data very quickly (for things like analytics or people retweeting Kanye) that you then later use other AWS services to analyze.
RedShift	Amazon Data Warehouse	Store a whole bunch of analytics data, do some processing, and dump it out.
SWF	Amazon EC2 Queue	Build a service of "deciders" and "workers" on top of EC2 to accomplish a set task. Unlike SQS - logic is set up inside the service to determine how and what should happen.
CloudTrail	Amazon Logging	Log who is doing what in your AWS stack (API calls).
CloudWatch	Amazon Status Pager	Get alerts about AWS services messing up or disconnecting.	PagerDuty, Statuspage
Config	Amazon Configuration Management	Keep from going insane if you have a large AWS setup and changes are happening that you want to track.

https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/