AWS Cheat Sheet
Amazon Web Services jargon decoded
10 terms
- AWS CDK
- AWS CDK is Amazon's Cloud Development Kit for defining AWS infrastructure in code. It is commonly used for repeatable cloud provisioning with high-level constructs, where teams need predictable behavior under real workloads rather than toy examples. Practitioners pay attention to synthesized templat
- AWS Certification
- A certification earned by passing Amazon Web Services exams covering cloud concepts, architecture, operations, security, or specialty domains. In tech culture these certifications are often discussed as career signals, learning tools, or hiring filters.
- AWS Lambda
- AWS Lambda is a serverless compute platform that runs short-lived functions on demand. It is commonly used for event-driven APIs, automation, and background tasks, where teams need predictable behavior under real workloads rather than toy examples. Practitioners pay attention to cold starts, timeout
- AWS re:Invent
- Amazon Web Services' annual conference held in Las Vegas since 2012, featuring keynotes, service launches, certification bootcamps, and an expo hall. It's where AWS announces major new services and features, typically drawing 50,000+ attendees and generating a firehose of announcements that take wee
- Bezos Memo
- A shorthand reference to influential internal Jeff Bezos memos, especially when discussing strategy, APIs, or organizational mandates.
- Cloud
- Cloud computing is the delivery of computing resources (servers, storage, databases, networking, software, and analytics) over the internet on a pay-as-you-go basis, rather than owning and maintaining physical hardware. The three primary service models are Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS, providin
- Launch Configuration
- A template that defines the instance parameters — AMI, instance type, key pair, security groups, and user data — used by an auto scaling group to launch new EC2 instances. AWS has largely replaced these with the more flexible Launch Templates.
- S3
- Amazon Simple Storage Service — a highly durable object storage service that stores files as objects in buckets, accessed via HTTP APIs. S3 offers 99.999999999% (11 nines) durability and has become the de facto standard for cloud file storage, static asset hosting, backups, and data lake foundations
- Two Pizza Rule
- A management heuristic that teams should stay small enough to be fed by two pizzas, used as shorthand for keeping groups lean.
- Two-Pizza Team
- Amazon's principle that no team should be larger than can be fed by two pizzas (roughly 6-10 people). Small teams have less communication overhead (n² communication paths), move faster, and maintain stronger ownership. Each two-pizza team owns a specific service or domain end-to-end — 'you build it,