How Does AWS Terminology Translate To Standard Network Terminology: A Quick Guide

Data Center

Most of the standard network devices that are dealt with when we have an On-Premise infrastructure, can be mapped with a certain AWS Cloud Service, just with a different name.

AWS Cloud has 2 very important groups of services: AWS Core Services and AWS Integrated Services

This guide should help you to easier make the mappings from components used in standard On-Premise Network Infrastructure to components in AWS Cloud Infrastructure, knows as services.

The AWS Global Infrastructure can be divided into 3 topics:

1. Regions - geographic locations in which public cloud service providers' data centers reside, they can consist of 2 or more availability zones
2. Availability Zones - isolated locations within data center regions from which public cloud services originate and operate
3. Edge Locations - where end users access services located at AWS.  They are located in most of the major cities around the world and are  specifically used by CloudFront (CDN) to distribute content to end user to reduce latency

Some of the most important AWS Services are mapped with the Standard Network Components in the following table

+===============================+==+=============================+
|   Standard Network Component  |  |     AWS Cloud Service       |  
+===============================+==+=============================+
| Server                        |  | EC2 Instance                |  
+-------------------------------+--+-----------------------------+
| HDD/SDD                       |  | Elastic Block Store Volume  |  
+-------------------------------+--+-----------------------------+
| Storage Device                |  | S3                          |  
+-------------------------------+--+-----------------------------+
| Firewall                      |  | Security Groups IAM         |
+-------------------------------+--+-----------------------------+
| DNS                           |  | Route53                     |  
+-------------------------------+--+-----------------------------+
| Database                      |  | Relational Database Service |  
+-------------------------------+--+-----------------------------+
| Router                        |  | Load Balancer               |  
+-------------------------------+--+-----------------------------+
| Monitoring Device/Log Tracker |  | CloudWatch                  |  
+-------------------------------+--+-----------------------------+

In the above table, the main components of AWS Infastructure are described, these in more detail have the following functions:

1. EC2 Instance - Elastic Compute Cloud is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Elastic because you can resize it based on your needs and you only pay for what you use.
2. Elastic Block Store Volume - an independent component, volume,  that can be assigned to your EC2 instance, you can choose whether you want it to be SSD or HDD and you need to create this volume in the same availability zone as the instance. You can attach it to an EC2 instance or detach from that instance and attach it to another one that is in the same availability zone. 
3. S3 - Amazon S3 is a managed cloud storage device that can store virtually unlimited number of objects organized in buckets. In S3, a bucket is used to hold the data and each bucket is associated with a region.
4. Security Group - in AWS cloud can act as a built in firewall, they are used to manage access to services.
5. Route53 - scalable domain name system (DNS) service intended to give business and developers a reliable way to direct end users to applications. This is accomplished by  translating domain names into the numeric IP  addresses which is how computers connect to each other.
6. RDS - the Relational Database Service whose basic building block is a database instance.
7. Load Balancer - automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, and Lambda functions. It can handle the varying load of your application traffic in a single Availability Zone or across multiple Availability Zones.
8. CloudWatch - monitoring service that monitors your AWS resources and applications that run on them in real time. CloudWatch is used for collecting and tracking metrics, log files and automatically reacts to unusual behavior.

Of course, there is just a brief introduction to the basic AWS Services. To understand more of how AWS works and all it’s services, these trainings are a great starting point.