What Is the AWS SAA-C03? Glossary & Key Terms

AWS Well-Architected Framework
A set of best-practice pillars (operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability) used to evaluate and design cloud architectures.
Amazon EC2
Elastic Compute Cloud, AWS's resizable virtual server service that lets users provision compute capacity on demand.
Amazon S3
Simple Storage Service, an object storage service offering scalable, durable storage accessed via APIs, with configurable storage classes and access controls.
Amazon VPC
Virtual Private Cloud, a logically isolated section of the AWS cloud where you can launch resources in a network you define, including subnets, route tables, and gateways.
Auto Scaling Group (ASG)
A construct that automatically adjusts the number of EC2 instances in a group based on demand, health checks, or schedules to maintain application availability and cost efficiency.
Availability Zone (AZ)
One or more discrete data centers within an AWS Region, each with independent power and networking, used to design fault-tolerant architectures across multiple AZs.
Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
A managed service that automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses, in one or more Availability Zones.
IAM (Identity and Access Management)
The AWS service for securely controlling access to AWS resources by managing users, groups, roles, and policies that define permissions.
Amazon RDS
Relational Database Service, a managed service that simplifies setup, operation, and scaling of relational databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Aurora.
Amazon DynamoDB
A fully managed, serverless NoSQL key-value and document database designed for consistent, single-digit-millisecond performance at any scale.
Amazon CloudFront
AWS's content delivery network (CDN) service that caches and delivers content from edge locations to reduce latency for end users.
AWS Lambda
A serverless compute service that runs code in response to events without requiring the user to provision or manage servers, billing only for actual execution time.
Amazon SQS
Simple Queue Service, a fully managed message queuing service used to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications.
Amazon SNS
Simple Notification Service, a fully managed pub/sub messaging service that fans out messages to multiple subscribers such as email, SMS, SQS queues, or Lambda functions.
Amazon Route 53
AWS's scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service, also supporting domain registration, health checking, and various traffic routing policies.
NAT Gateway
A managed AWS service that enables instances in a private subnet to access the internet or other AWS services outbound, while blocking unsolicited inbound connections.
Security Group
A stateful virtual firewall attached to EC2 instances or ENIs that controls inbound and outbound traffic at the instance level using allow rules only.
Network ACL (NACL)
A stateless, subnet-level firewall in a VPC that evaluates numbered allow and deny rules in order to control traffic entering or leaving a subnet.
AWS KMS
Key Management Service, a managed service for creating, storing, and controlling cryptographic keys used to encrypt data across AWS services.
Amazon EBS
Elastic Block Store, persistent block-level storage volumes that attach to a single EC2 instance, commonly used for boot volumes and databases.
Amazon EFS
Elastic File System, a fully managed, scalable NFS file system that multiple EC2 instances can mount concurrently across Availability Zones.
AWS CloudFormation
An infrastructure-as-code service that provisions and manages AWS resources predictably by defining them as templates deployed as a single stack.
Multi-AZ Deployment
An RDS configuration that maintains a synchronously replicated standby database instance in a different Availability Zone for automatic failover and high availability.
Read Replica
An asynchronously replicated, read-only copy of a database used to offload read traffic from the primary instance and improve read scalability.