AWS Solutions Architect Professional key terms

A physically separate data center group within an AWS Region, with independent power, cooling, and networking. Spreading resources across multiple zones lets an application survive the failure of a single facility.

A collection of EC2 instances or other compute resources managed as one unit, which automatically launches or terminates capacity to match demand and replaces instances that fail health checks.

A periodic probe a load balancer sends to registered targets to confirm they can serve traffic. Unhealthy targets are removed from rotation until they respond normally again.

Running production resources in two or more Availability Zones at once, usually with synchronous replication for databases, so traffic can shift automatically when one zone degrades.

A DNS policy that returns a primary record while it passes health checks and switches answers to a standby record when the primary is considered unhealthy.

The maximum acceptable elapsed time before a workload is working again after a disruption. It drives how warm the standby environment is and how automated the recovery process must be.

The maximum acceptable amount of data, measured in time, that a workload can lose during a disruption. It determines replication frequency and whether copies must be synchronous.

A disaster recovery pattern where only a minimal core, such as replicated data and a few pre-configured resources, runs in the standby Region and is scaled out during a failover.

A disaster recovery pattern where a scaled-down but fully functional copy of the workload always runs in a second Region and is enlarged to production size during a failover.

Designing a system so recovery relies only on pre-provisioned capacity and data paths, not on control-plane actions such as launching new instances during an outage.

A separate queue that receives messages a consumer could not process successfully after a set number of attempts, so failed work is preserved for inspection instead of looping forever.

A property of an operation that produces the same result whether it runs once or many times, which lets clients and queues safely retry requests after ambiguous failures.

An Aurora cluster with a primary Region and up to five read-only secondary Regions that receive changes with low lag, allowing fast promotion of a secondary during a regional failure.

A read-only copy of a database that receives changes from the primary instance, used to offload reporting and read traffic or to serve as a promotion target.

A serverless compute service that runs code in response to events or requests, scales automatically, and bills only for the time the function executes.

A serverless compute engine for containers that lets you run ECS or EKS tasks without provisioning or managing the underlying EC2 hosts.

A managed service for publishing, securing, throttling, and monitoring HTTP, REST, and WebSocket APIs that front Lambda functions or other backends.

A fully managed key-value and document database that delivers single-digit millisecond latency at any scale and supports global tables for multi-Region replication.

A managed service for ingesting large volumes of streaming records that multiple consumers can read, with records retained for a configurable period, typically days.

A managed workflow service that coordinates multi-step distributed processes using state machines, handling retries, branching, waits, and error handling without custom orchestration code.

A serverless event bus that routes events from AWS services, SaaS applications, and custom sources to targets using rules that match on event content.

A networking service that gives applications static anycast IP addresses and routes user traffic over the AWS global backbone to the nearest healthy endpoint.

A regional hub that connects VPCs, VPNs, and Direct Connect gateways through a single attachment point, replacing complex full-mesh peering with centralized routing.

A service that continuously replicates source servers, including physical, virtual, or cloud machines, into AWS and performs automated cutover to EC2 instances.

A managed service that migrates data between homogeneous or heterogeneous databases with continuous replication, keeping source and target synchronized until cutover.

A desktop tool that converts database schemas and stored code from one engine to another, highlighting objects that cannot be converted automatically and need manual work.

A managed data-transfer service that moves files between on-premises storage and AWS storage services over the network with scheduling, verification, and incremental transfers.

Physical devices and rugged edge compute units that AWS ships to a site so large datasets can be moved into or out of AWS without depending on internet bandwidth.

A migration approach that gradually replaces parts of a legacy application with new services, routing traffic piece by piece until the old system can be retired.

A pre-configured, governed multi-account AWS environment with baseline networking, identity, logging, and security controls that new accounts inherit when they are created.

An organization-level policy that sets the maximum permissions available to accounts in AWS Organizations, restricting which actions any principal in those accounts can perform.

A service that sets up and governs a multi-account environment using a landing zone, guardrails, and a dashboard, automating account provisioning and compliance checks.

An IAM role in a trusting account that principals from another account can assume temporarily, giving access without creating permanent users in the target account.

A service that records resource configuration changes and evaluates them against rules, showing whether resources are compliant and how their settings evolved over time.

A service that records API activity across an AWS account, showing who made which request, from where, and when, and delivering those events to S3, CloudWatch Logs, or EventBridge.

A pricing model where you commit to a consistent amount of compute usage for one or three years in exchange for lower hourly rates on Lambda, Fargate, and EC2.

EC2 capacity offered at large discounts that AWS can reclaim with short notice, suited to fault-tolerant, interruptible workloads such as batch processing and stateless workers.

Key-value labels applied to AWS resources that appear in billing reports, letting you split costs by team, project, or environment for chargeback and analysis.

A service that analyzes utilization metrics and configuration to recommend rightsizing for EC2 instances, Auto Scaling groups, EBS volumes, and Lambda functions.

A set of rules that automatically transitions objects to cheaper storage classes or deletes them after defined intervals, controlling long-term storage cost without manual effort.