EC2 - Elastic Compute Cloud
Create virtual machines/instances.
The size of instances range from micro
to 32+ processors with GBs of memory.
Instances can be placed in many different regions for redundancy (West Coast, East Coast, Europe, Asia, etc)
IAM - Identify and Access Management
Create Users
, Roles
, and Permissions
RDS - Relational Database Storage
Create Postgres, MySQL, Maria DB, or Aurora instances. I think of this as a specific type of EC2 instance being created, with a database pre-installed.
VPC - Virtual Private Cloud
Create public or private virtual clouds. Virtual clouds have many virtual containers/boxes/instances.
Public clouds often start with CIDR blocks like 172.30.0.0/24. Private clouds often start with CIDR blocks like 10.0.0.0/16.
Within a VPC is a Subnet
. Subnets are use CIDR blocks to define ranges of addresses. Subnets are often used to separate public and private traffic, as well as separate types of machines or processes.