Background: Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a large variety of products and for many of us coming from traditional on-premises environments it can be easy to get confused with the terminology. My goal here is to give a brief description of the AWS services (as of June 2016) and identify their on-prem equivalents (or best match in my opinion). Please feel free to comment if you see any areas that can use clarification. This is a list for my personal supplement and is not meant to be an authoritative or all-encompassing resource. All information was obtained from the AWS Documentation site, which you can visit at aws.amazon.com/documentation.
| AWS Product | On-Premise Equivalent |
| EC2 – Provides resizeable computing capacity in the form of server instances. | Virtual Machines (VMware. XenServer, Hyper-V, etc…) |
| EC2 Container Service – Provides management of the compute resources available to a client via the cluster manager. | VMware vCenter, Citrix XenCenter, Microsoft SCVMM |
| Elastic Beanstalk – Platform for development and hosting of web applications in a sandbox. | Application Sandbox |
| Lambda – Compute service that runs code in response to user-definable events. Lambda can automatically scale the resources available to the code based on usage. | Application Sandbox |
| S3 – Online file storage. | Enterprise Storage |
| CloudFront – Amazon’s content delivery network service which provides content to users (such as media) with high performance and high availability. | Globally distributed content delivery network (CDN) |
| Elastic File System – File storage for EC2 instances | Network Attached Storage |
| Glacier – Amazon storage service optimized for infrequently used data. | Archival data storage or DR storage |
| Snowball – AWS Snowball is a service for moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS using Amazon-provided secure appliances for transport. | Enterprise storage migration tools (differs among vendors but most generally allow you to safely and securely move a large amount of data from one storage device to another) |
| Storage Gateway – AWS service that connects on-prem software appliance with cloud-based storage. | Cloud Storage Gateway |
| RDS – AWS Relational Database Service is a service that allows a customer to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. | Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle RDBMS, MySQL |
| DynamoDB – Fully managed proprietary NOSQL database service. | NoSQL database |
| ElastiCache – Cloud deployed cache environment. | Memcaches, Redis |
| Redshift – AWS data warehouse service used for data analysis applications. | PostgreSQL |
| DMS – AWS Database Migration Service used for migrating data from on-prem, AWS RDS, or AWS EC2 DB to another DB on an AWS instance. You can also migrate a DB from an AWS service back to an on-prem DB. | Vendor-specific DB migration service (i.e. Oracle Database Migration) |
| VPC – AWS Virtual Private Cloud allows customers to launch AWS resources into a pre-defined virtual network. VPC’s like a traditional on-premises network can be further segmented into subnets. | Enterprise network |
| Direct Connect – 1 gb or 10 gb fiber-optic link from enterprise router to AWS Direct Connect router allowing a direct connection to the AWS cloud and AWS VPC. | ISP business connection |
| Route 53 – Amazon’s scalable and highly available Domain Name System (DNS). Name is a reference to the ports used by DNS; TCP/UDP port 53. | DNS |
| CodeCommit – Version control service. | Git repositories |
| CodeDeploy – Application deployment service that enables developers to automate deployment and updates as needed. | Software deployment, application lifecycle management |
| CodePipeline – Service that allows developers to diagram and automate the steps to release their software. | Application lifecycle management |
| CloudWatch – Monitors AWS resources and applications in real-time | Monitoring |
| CloudFormation – Allows customers to quickly create and provision AWS infrastructure using templates. | Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Some examples are Ansible Tower and CFEngine |
| CloudTrail – Monitoring tool that tracks AWS API calls for your account. | 3rd Party Analytics Platform, Google Analytics |
| Config – Provides detailed view of the resources associated with your AWS account. | |
| OpsWorks – Application and stacks management service. | Chef |
| Service Catalog – Allows IT admins to create, manage, and distribute portfolios of approved products to end users who can than access those portfolios via a personalized portal. | Access based enumeration |
| Trusted Advisor – Support for users of AWS. | Vendor specific account and billing support. |
| IAM – Identity and Access Management allows AWS customers to manage users and permissions in AWS. | Delegated Administration, Microsoft Active Directory |
| Directory Service – Allows clients to connect on-prem Microsoft Active Directory infrastructure to AWS or setup new AD infrastructure in the cloud. | Microsoft Active Directory |
| Inspector – AWS Inspector is a security vunerability assessment tool that helps improve the security and compliance of your AWS resources. | 3rd Party Security/Vulnerability Assessment or consulting service (ie. provided by Qualys, Fireeye, Symantec, etc….) |
| WAF – AWS web application firewall service that allows customers to monitor web requests for AWS CloudFront distributions. | Web Application Firewall |
| Certificate Manager – AWS service that allows customers to manage and deploy SSL/TLS certificates on AWS-managed resources. | Microsoft Certificate Services |
| EMR – AWS Elastic Map Reduce is a service for processing large amounts of data (web indexing, data mining, log file analysis, machine learning, scientific simulation, data warehousing, etc…) | Hadoop |
| Data Pipeline – AWS service for automating movement and transformation of data. | Task scheduler |
| Elasticsearch Service – AWS search and analytics engine. | Elasticsearch, Apache Solr, other Enterprise search engines |
| Kinesis – AWS Kinesis Streams are used to collect and process large streams of data records in real time. | Real Time Stream Processing |
| Machine Learning – AWS service that utilizes machine learning models to find patterns in data for building smart applications. | Google Prediction API? |
| AWS IoT – AWS Internet of Things enables bi-direcitonal communication between internet-connected entities or objects. | Internet of Things, Skynet? |
| GameLift – Fully managed service for deploying, operating, and scaling session-based multiplayer game servers. | Steam, XBox Live, PSN |
| Mobile Hub – Provides console to help build, test, and monitor mobile applications. | Mobile Application life-cycle |
| Cognito – AWS service for creating user identities, authentication schemes, and saving mobile user data in AWS. | Federated Identity Provider, Single Sign On |
| Device Farm – Mobile App testing service that allows customers to test iOS, Android, and Fire OS apps on those physical devices hosted by AWS. | Mobile Device emulators, mobile device lab, Google Cloud Test Lab |
| Mobile Analytics – AWS service for collecting, visualizing, and understanding app usage data. | 3rd Party Mobile App Analytics, Google Mobile Analytics |
| SNS – AWS Simple Notification Service used for sending and receiving notifications from the cloud. | Email, SMS, HTTP/S notifications |
| API Gateway – Service for publishing, maintaining, and monitoring APIs. | REST API |
| AppStream – AWS Service for streaming I/O between hosted applications and personal devices such as computers, tablets, and mobile phones. | Citrix XenApp, VMware ThinApp, Microsoft App-V |
| CloudSearch – AWS service allowing customers to implement a search solution for their website. | Cloud-based search solutions |
| Elastic Transcoder – AWS service for converting media files stored in AWS S3 into common formats used by consumer playback devices. | Media transcoder |
| SES – AWS Simple Email Service for sending and receiving email. | Microsoft Exchange |
| SQS – Simple queue service for handling messages or workflows between other components in a system. | |
| SWF – AWS service for building applications that can coordinate work across distributed components. | |
| WorkSpaces – AWS cloud-based desktop experience for end users. | Citrix XenDesktop, VMware Horizon |
| WorkDocs – AWS fully managed, secure enterprise storage and sharing service | Citrix ShareFile, Dropbox, Shared Storage |
| WorkMail – Managed email and calendaring service | Microsoft Outlook |
Resources:
- aws.amazon.com/documentation