Found this great nugget from /u/floppydiskette on Reddit with a slight correction:
- EC2 – Elastic Compute Cloud: basically a DIY virtual cloud server. You can spin up multiple EC2 instances.
- S3 – Simple Storage Service: cloud storage for static files (images, documents, css, js, etc.)
- Route 53 – DNS (Domain Name Service) provided by Amazon.
- RDS – Relational Database Service: cloud database.
- ELB – Elastic Load Balancer: point your DNS at a load balancer instead of an IP; you can set your load balancer to “round robin” between multiple EC2 instances.
- AMI – Automated Machine Image: an image of your EC2 instance that can be used to spin up multiple instances.
- CloudFront – Caches content such as HTML, images, and video at edge locations for a period of time that you specify to improve performance of websites.
So, for an example LAMP stack running WordPress…
- Your Apache server and php files are on EC2
- Your static CSS, JavaScript, images, fonts and documents are on S3 with CloudFront in front of it
- Your MySQL database is on RDS
- Your have a DNS set up in Route 53
- Pointing to an ELB
- Balancing between multiple EC2 instances that are based on an AMI.
And of course, one of my favourites when starting with AWS is – Amazon Web Services in Plain English.
