Cloud concepts

Virtual Machines

Virtual Machines emulate the architecture and functionality of physical computers in the cloud. In AWS, VMs are called Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which can be created using different operating systems (i.e. Linux, Windows) and vCPU sizes. Using EC2 eliminates the need to invest in hardware up-front. EC2 can be used to launch as many or as few virtual servers needed, configure security and networking, and manage storage. Amazon EC2 enables scaling up or down to handle changes in requirements or spikes in popularity, reducing the need to forecast traffic.

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Storage Units

Storage services are also provided for the VMs, in AWS they come in two types depending on your needs:

  1. Elastic Block Storage (EBS): block level storage volumes that can be directly mount to EC2
  2. Simple Storage Service (S3): bucket of storage accessible through API or command line
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Databases

Relational Database Service (RDS) allows to set up, operate and scale relational databases (i.e. MySQL)

Serverless

Removes the need to worry about managing and operating web servers for applications. It also provides scaling and cost-efficient options.