AWS Terms

Aurora is part of the Amazon RDS family of database services. It is a high performance managed relational database that is compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Caching is a method to store frequently accessed information in a temporary memory location on a server. Amazon ElastiCache is a Caching-as-a-Service that provides this caching layer. It provides two caching engine types, Memcached and Redis.

This monitors your AWS estate and gives you some control over the change management, and compliance monitoring. Handy when you have a regulator to worry about.

This creates a direct link between your datacenter and the AWS backbone, so you’re not talking over a VPN or public internet. This is significantly faster than a VPN and more consistent — no more spikes at peak times.

Elastic Block Store.

This is a virtual disk, but it’s a type of disk suited to reading and writing in “blocks”. Databases tend to use this sort of storage type, as it has a much faster read & write speed.

In this sense, “Elastic” is not that far from an elastic band. The capacity of your resources can stretch and shrink to meet demand, within limits. Compute is running apps, although in this case, it refers to virtual servers or virtual machines (VMs).

Basically a network drive. Cool pricing model — you just use it and pay for what you use. Unlike disk-based storage pricing, such as EBS, where you have to provision and pay for a whole disk. One less headache.

Scaling by adding more machines to your pool of available resources.

This is the process of managing and provisioning computer data centers through machine-readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools. An IT infrastructure managed by this process comprises both the physical equipment, such as bare-metal servers, as well as virtual machines, and any associated resources

This is somewhere between compute and networking really (and in truth they live in the EC2 section of the AWS console), but I stretched the limits of what I could call a “compute service” already, so they’re going here instead.