--- title: "8 AWS Terms Project Managers Need to Know" id: "7245" type: "post" slug: "8-aws-terms-project-managers-need-to-know" published_at: "2020-09-02T18:45:00+00:00" modified_at: "2022-02-03T20:13:16+00:00" url: "https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/8-aws-terms-project-managers-need-to-know/" markdown_url: "https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/8-aws-terms-project-managers-need-to-know.md" excerpt: "Recently, an anonymous individual told me that their company was planning to migrate to AWS and they were looking for someone to help with the project management side. This anonymous person was hoping to be that project manager. There was..." taxonomy_category: - "Uncategorized" --- Recently, an anonymous individual told me that their company was planning to migrate to AWS and they were looking for someone to help with the project management side. This anonymous person was hoping to be that project manager. There was one caveat: The right individual would be “familiar with AWS.” The inquiring mind was not, so they asked me what they needed to learn. First, it’s important to understand that AWS is not a distinct product. It’s well over 200 products. Nobody—including AWS employees—is deeply familiar with all of them. Nobody. That said, from a project management perspective, it’s important to be familiar with what we’ll call the Big Services and a few other odds and ends. You can learn everything else that’s not on this list as it comes up—the same way the rest of us do. Let’s jump in. ## 1. EC2 [Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/) (Amazon EC2) are virtual machines (called instances) that can run any software you care to shove in them. This is the baseline service that virtually everyone who uses AWS uses as their primary workhorse. The engineering is deep, but it shouldn’t matter to you. In my [consulting work](https://www.duckbillgroup.com/services) , EC2 is responsible for the *majority* of the entire AWS global spend. Think about that for a second. A single entry from a 200-strong services list is over 50% of where the money goes. That’s mind-boggling! ## 2. S3 [Amazon Simple Storage Service](https://aws.amazon.com/s3/) (Amazon S3) is what’s known as object storage. “Put a file or files into S3, it keeps them for you. Retrieve them at any time.” S3 can store more data than you will ever be able to afford. There are [no capacity limits here](https://twitter.com/quinnypig/status/1288375008054489089) , and pricing is linear. Note that security is going to matter here, but don’t let the “user data leaks from S3 bucket” headlines fool you. Those come from misconfigurations by end-customers. Security is going to be important to get right here, but the service is most assuredly NOT insecure. (If you’re interested, it stems from the alternate use of S3 as a static web server in which files are supposed to be public.) ## 3. RDS [Amazon Relational Database Service](https://aws.amazon.com/rds/) (Amazon RDS) is a managed database offering that lets you choose from these databases: Amazon Aurora (their custom thing with PostgreSQL and MySQL compatibility), PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle Database, and SQL Server. AWS runs the database for you so you don’t have to handle a lot of the administrative bits. Some folks migrate to EC2 to run their databases manually when they need more control; the legitimacy of this approach is hotly debated. ## 4. Lambda Part of the serverless revolution, [AWS Lambda](https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/) is the New Hotness. You write code and AWS executes it for you when certain conditions are met—like the passage of time, when a file shows up, when a user clicks a button, and so on. You can consider this to be most commonly used to “glue” other AWS services together. ## 5. AWS Regions All of the above and more live in what are called [AWS Regions](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regions_az/) . These are vast collections of many data centers scattered across the world. They are referred to both by their region (say, Northern Virginia) as well as by their AWS designation (the Northern Virginia region is called us-east-1). ## 6. Availability Zones Inside each region there are multiple [Availability Zones](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regions_az/) or AZs, which are data centers located a few miles apart from each other. These are great for local disaster planning, but an issue that affects an entire AWS region will take down multiple AZs. ## 7. Data Transfer Data transfer tends to be a big bill item. But the nuances of that spend item are [vast and deep](https://www.duckbillgroup.com/resources/) . *In general* transfer from the internet to AWS is free, and transfer out of AWS costs money. From a project perspective, we’ll dig into the specifics is fine. Essentially, anything can send data anywhere you’d like is the capability story here. ## 8. Billing As for billing, it’s generally you pay for what you use. If you use more resources, you pay more. If you don’t turn something off, nothing will do it for you. There has to be a “close the loop” or “garbage collection” process that goes back and turns off the stuff you’re done with. The golden model of the cloud is that you increase resource usage along with demand (often called auto scaling) then turn it back down as demand wanes. This, of course, is much harder than it sounds. But it’s actually what I specialize in, so [don’t be afraid to reach out if you need help reining in your AWS spend](https://www.duckbillgroup.com/services/) . I’ve gotten some feedback that there should be a separate line item here for “Security,” but let’s face it: Security is going to need to be addressed throughout the entire process. This is why having security-focused design reviews is so important. It’s not worth calling out explicitly, because I (perhaps naively) presume that security discussions will be baked into everything. Lastly, you may notice that there’s no snark whatsoever in this post! That’s because helping people find jobs is something I’m deadly serious about. If you think I may be able to help, [my DMs are always open](https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/) . by Corey Quinn Corey is the Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill, where he specializes in helping companies improve their AWS bills by making them smaller and less horrifying. He also hosts the "Screaming in the Cloud" and "AWS Morning Brief" podcasts; and curates "Last Week in AWS," a weekly newsletter summarizing the latest in AWS news, blogs, and tools, sprinkled with snark and thoughtful analysis in roughly equal measure. ## More Posts from Corey [Back to the Blog](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/) [https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/cloudwatch-omni-infinidash-review/](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/cloudwatch-omni-infinidash-review/) ### [Infinidash: AWS’s New Observability Play Has Great Bones and a Terrible Bedside Manner](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/cloudwatch-omni-infinidash-review/) [By Corey Quinn](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/author/cquinn/) Infinidash: AWS’s New Observability Play Has Great Bones and a Terrible Bedside Manner AWS has just released something fascinating in the form of CloudWatch Omni. I want to be upfront before I dive further: “CloudWatch Omni” is a wretched name that I will not be using, so for the rest of this article and the […] [Read More about Infinidash: AWS’s New Observability Play Has Great Bones and a Terrible Bedside Manner](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/cloudwatch-omni-infinidash-review/) [https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/reading-observability-tools-thats-a-robots-job/](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/reading-observability-tools-thats-a-robots-job/) ### [Reading Observability Tools? That’s a Robot’s Job](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/reading-observability-tools-thats-a-robots-job/) [By Corey Quinn](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/author/cquinn/) Last Thursday Honeycomb was kind enough to hand me the closing keynote slot at O11yCon, a conference whose entire premise is that observability matters and the people in the room are the ones who would know. I used that slot to argue that the primary reader of your telemetry is no longer a human, and […] [Read More about Reading Observability Tools? That’s a Robot’s Job](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/reading-observability-tools-thats-a-robots-job/) [https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/s3-is-not-a-filesystem-but-now-theres-one-in-front-of-it/](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/s3-is-not-a-filesystem-but-now-theres-one-in-front-of-it/) ### [S3 Is Not a Filesystem (But Now There’s One In Front of It)](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/s3-is-not-a-filesystem-but-now-theres-one-in-front-of-it/) [By Corey Quinn](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/author/cquinn/) I’ve been saying “S3 is not a filesystem” for over a decade. I’ve said it on stages, in newsletters, on podcasts, and directly to the faces of large company employees who were too polite to tell me to shut up before they went back to their FUSE monstrosities. It was one of those reliable truths […] [Read More about S3 Is Not a Filesystem (But Now There’s One In Front of It)](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/s3-is-not-a-filesystem-but-now-theres-one-in-front-of-it/) ## Get the newsletter! Stay up to date on the latest AWS news, opinions, and tools, all lovingly sprinkled with a bit of snark. "*" indicates required fields