AWS_to_English

Drawing parallels to make AWS instance names more accessible [AWS Docs] [Reference]

App Service

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EC2

Really Means	Purpose	Reference
Amazon Virtual Servers	Host the bits of things you think of as a computer.	http://www.linode.com, It's handwavy, but EC2 instances are similar to the virtual private servers you'd get at Linode, DigitalOcean or Rackspace.
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IAM

Really Means	Purpose	Reference
Users, Keys and Certs	Set up additional users, set up new AWS Keys and policies.
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S3

Really Means	Purpose	Reference
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.
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VPC

Really Means	Purpose	Reference
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.	For the networking folks, this is like VLAN.
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Lambda

Really Means	Purpose	Reference
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.
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Web Developer Services

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API Gateway

Really Means	Purpose	Reference
API Proxy	Proxy your apps API through this so you can throttle bad client traffic, test new versions, and present methods more cleanly.	3Scale
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RDS

Really Means	Purpose	Reference
Amazon SQL	Be your app's Mysql, Postgres, and Oracle database.	Heroku Postgres
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Route53

Really Means	Purpose	Reference
Amazon DNS + Domains	Buy a new domain and set up the DNS records for that domain.	DNSimple, GoDaddy, Gandi
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SES

Really Means	Purpose	Reference
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
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Cloudfront

Really Means	Purpose	Reference
Amazon CDN	Make your websites load faster by spreading out static file delivery to be closer to where your users are.	MaxCDN, Akamai
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CloudSearch

Really Means	Purpose	Reference
Amazon Fulltext Search	Pull in data on S3 or in RDS and then search it for every instance of 'Jimmy.'	Sphinx, Solr, ElasticSearch
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DynamoDB

Really Means	Purpose	Reference
Amazon NoSQL	Be your app's massively scalable key valueish store.	MongoLab
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Elasticache

Really Means	Purpose	Reference
Amazon Memcached	Be your app's Memcached or Redis.	Redis to Go, Memcachier

Elastic Transcoder

Really Means	Purpose	Reference
Amazon Beginning Cut Pro	Deal with video weirdness (change formats, compress, etc.).

SQS

Really Means	Purpose	Reference
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

Really Means	Purpose	Reference
AWS Firewall	Block bad requests to Cloudfront protected sites (aka stop people trying 10,000 passwords against /wp-admin)	Sophos, Kapersky
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Mobile App Development

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Cognito

Really Means	Purpose	Reference
Amazon OAuth as a Service	Give end users - (non AWS) - the ability to log in with Google, Facebook, etc.	OAuth.io
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Device Farm

Really Means	Purpose	Reference
Amazon Drawer of Old Android Devices	Test your app on a bunch of different IOS and Android devices simultaneously.
MobileTest, iOS emulator
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Mobile Analytics

Really Means	Purpose	Reference
N/A	Track what people are doing inside of your app.	Flurry
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SNS

Really Means	Purpose	Reference
Amazon Messenger	Send mobile notifications, emails and/or SMS messages	UrbanAirship, Twilio
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Ops and Code Deployment Services

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