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This glossary explains the core AWS services and concepts most relevant to organisations operating in New Zealand. Terms are grouped by theme exactly as structured across Compute, Containers, Storage, Database, Networking and Content Delivery, Security, Identity and Compliance, Management and Governance, Cost Management, Developer Tools, Infrastructure as Code, Application Integration, Analytics, Machine Learning and AI, Migration and Transfer, and Front End Web and Mobile.
Each definition includes practical context on when the service matters, particularly for government agencies, healthcare providers, financial institutions and enterprises navigating privacy, risk and compliance obligations under the New Zealand Privacy Act and other sector regulations.
Analytics services enable data processing, warehousing and business intelligence. New Zealand organisations pursuing digital transformation rely on analytics to support evidence based decision making and improve operational visiblity.
Amazon Athena: Serverless SQL queries on S3 data.
EMR stands for Amazon Elastic MapReduce: Managed Hadoop and Spark clusters.
Amazon QuickSight: BI and data visualisation.
Amazon Kinesis: Real‑time data streaming platform.
Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka.
Amazon OpenSearch Service: Managed search and analytics.
Application integration services support event driven architectures, messaging and API management. Organisations modernising legacy systems in New Zealand often require integration between on premises systems and cloud services. Managed integration services reduce complexity and improve reliability.
Amazon Simple Queue Service: Message queuing for decoupled systems.
Amazon Simple Notification Service: Pub/sub messaging and notifications.
Amazon EventBridge: Serverless event bus.
AWS Step Functions: Visual serverless workflow orchestration.
Amazon API Gateway: Managed API creation and management.
AWS AppSync: Managed GraphQL service.
AWS AppConfig: Feature flags and configuration management.
Container orchestration and container registry services support microservices and modern application delivery. Organisations in New Zealand adopting cloud native architectures often use containers to improve deployment consistency and operational resilience. Understanding orchestration services helps support workloads remain secure, observable and compliant.
Amazon Elastic Container Registry: Secure, scalable registry for Docker images used with ECS and EKS.
Amazon Elastic Container Service: Managed container orchestration for Docker containers.
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service: Managed Kubernetes control plane.
AWS Fargate: Serverless compute engine for containers with no server management required.
AWS App Mesh: Service mesh to control and monitor microservice communications.
Cost management services provide visibility into usage and spending. As cloud adoption grows across New Zealand, financial accountability and cost predictability are increasingly important. Proactive monitoring supports FinOps practices and executive reporting.
AWS Budgets: Set and monitor cost and usage budgets.
What it does: Budgets allows organisations to define spending thresholds and receive alerts as usage approaches limits.
When to use it: Used to enforce financial guardrails and reduce unexpected cost growth.
Why it matters in New Zealand: Cloud cost transparency is increasingly a board level concern. Budget controls support stronger FinOps discipline.
AWS Cost Explorer: Visualize and analyse AWS spending.
Database services support relational, non relational and specialised database workloads. For regulated sectors in New Zealand, database architecture must support auditability, resilience and strong access controls. Selecting the right database service impacts both performance and governance outcomes.
Amazon Relational Database Service: Managed relational databases with backups, patching, and scaling.
Amazon Aurora: High‑performance MySQL‑ and PostgreSQL‑compatible relational database
Amazon DynamoDB: Fully managed NoSQL key‑value and document database.
Amazon ElastiCache: In‑memory cache using Redis or Memcached.
Amazon Neptune: Fully managed graph database service.
Amazon DocumentDB: MongoDB‑compatible document database service.
Amazon Timestream: Time‑series database for IoT and operational data.
Amazon Quantum Ledger Database: Immutable, cryptographically verifiable ledger database.
Developer tools support code management, build pipelines and automated deployments. Modern software delivery practices are increasingly expected in enterprise and public sector settings in New Zealand. Automation improves repeatability, reduces human error and supports audit requirements.
AWS Cloud9: Cloud‑based IDE for development.
AWS CodeCommit: Git‑based source control.
AWS CodeBuild: Managed build and test service.
AWS CodePipeline: CI/CD automation service.
AWS CodeDeploy: Automated application deployments.
AWS CodeGuru: AI‑powered code reviews and profiling.
AWS X‑Ray: Distributed tracing and performance analysis.
Amazon Quantum Ledger Database: Immutable, cryptographically verifiable ledger database.
Infrastructure as code services enable programmatic provisioning of cloud resources. For New Zealand organisations subject to governance and change management standards, Infrastructure as Code improves consistency, traceability and compliance alignment.
AWS CloudFormation: Template‑based infrastructure provisioning.
AWS Cloud Development Kit: IaC using programming languages.
AWS Serverless Application Model: Simplified serverless deployments.
Core compute services that run applications and workloads in AWS environments includes virtual machines, serverless compute and managed platform services. For New Zealand organisations, compute decisions affect cost structure, performance, scalability and regulatory control. Selecting the appropriate compute model is critical when modernising legacy systems or designing secure cloud architectures.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud: Scalable virtual servers for general‑purpose workloads with configurable instance types, storage and networking.
AWS Lambda: Serverless compute that runs code in response to events with automatic scaling and pay‑per‑use pricing.
Misconception: There are no servers involved and no operational responsibility.
Clarification: Servers still exist, but AWS manages the provisioning, scaling and infrastructure maintenance. Organisations remain responsible for secure configuration, code quality, access control and compliance with privacy obligations.
Amazon Lightsail: Simplified VPS compute with storage and networking at predictable monthly pricing.
AWS Batch: Fully managed batch computing service for running jobs at any scale.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk: Platform‑as‑a‑service for deploying and managing applications.
Machine learning and AI services support model training, deployment and generative AI capabilities. With growing interest in generative AI across New Zealand, organisations must balance innovation with privacy and governance requirements. Understanding these services is essential for responsible AI adoption.
Amazon SageMaker: End-to-end ML build, train and deploy platform.
What it does: SageMaker supports data preparation, model training, tuning and deployment within a managed environment.
When to use it: Used when building custom machine learning models that require greater control than foundation model services.
Why it matters in New Zealand: Organisations developing proprietary models must maintain oversight of training data, model governance and operational risk.
Amazon Bedrock: Foundation models for generative AI apps.
What it does:Bedrock provides managed access to foundation models through secure APIs for building generative AI applications.
When to use it: Used when developing internal assistants, document analysis tools or conversational applications.
Misconception: Generative AI services automatically keep all data within one country.
Clarification: Data handling depends on configuration, model selection and region choice. Organisations must deliberately design AI workloads to align with privacy, residency and internal governance expectations.
Why it matters in New Zealand: AI initiatives must account for privacy and data governance. Region selection and configuration controls are critical when handling sensitive information.
Generative AI assistant for business and developers.
Amazon Lex: Conversational interfaces using voice and text.
Amazon Polly: Text‑to‑speech service.
Amazon Recognition: Image and video analysis.
Amazon Comprehend: NLP and sentiment analysis.
Amazon Transcribe: Speech‑to‑text service.
Amazon Translate: Neural machine translation.
Amazon Textract: OCR and document data extraction.
Management services provide monitoring, logging, configuration tracking and policy enforcement across AWS environments. New Zealand organisations operating multiple accounts or business units require strong governance controls to reduce misconfiguration risk and maintain operational oversight.
Amazon CloudWatch: Monitoring for metrics, logs, alarms and dashboards.
AWS CloudTrail: Audit logging of API activity.
AWS Config: Resource configuration tracking and compliance auditing.
AWS Systems Manager: Operations hub for patching, automation and inventory.
AWS Organizations: Multi-account management and governance.
What it does: Organizations allows central policy enforcement and billing management across multiple AWS accounts.
When to use it: Used when operating separate accounts for business units, environments or projects.
Why it matters in New Zealand: Multi account structures are common in enterprise and public sector environments. Central governance reduces misconfiguration risk.
AWS Control Tower: Automated multi-account setup with guardrails.
What it does: Control Tower builds a structured landing zone with predefined governance controls.
When to use it: Used when establishing a new AWS environment or formalising governance maturity.
Misconception: Control Tower guarantees full compliance out of the box.
Clarification: Control Tower provides baseline guardrails and multi account governance. Organisations must still design and implement policies aligned to their own regulatory and risk requirements.
Why it matters in New Zealand: Supports consistent security baselines and operational oversight across complex organisations.
AWS Trusted Advisor: Best‑practice checks for cost, security and reliability.
AWS Service Catalog: Governed catalog of approved resources.
AWS License Manager: License tracking and compliance.
Well-Architected Tool: Reviews workloads against AWS best-practice pillars.
What it does: The tool evaluates workloads across cost, security, reliability, performance efficiency and sustainability.
When to use it: Used during migration planning and ongoing optimisation cycles.
Why it matters in New Zealand: Structured reviews support internal risk frameworks and demonstrate architectural due diligence.
Migration and transfer services support moving applications, databases and large datasets into AWS. For New Zealand organisations, structured migration planning reduces operational disruption and ensures regulatory obligations continue to be met throughout the transition.
AWS Database Migration Service: Database migration with minimal downtime.
What it does: DMS replicates data from source databases to AWS targets while applications remain operational.
When to use it: Used when migrating production databases to managed AWS database services.
Misconception: Database migration tools remove all migration risk.
Clarification: DMS reduces downtime and simplifies data replication, but migration planning, validation testing and governance oversight remain essential to minimise disruption and compliance exposure.
Why it matters in New Zealand: Critical systems in financial services, healthcare and retail must minimise disruption during transition. DMS supports lower risk migration pathways.
AWS DataSync: Automated data transfer service.
Managed SFTP, FTPS, and FTP to S3 or EFS.
AWS Snowball: Physical data transfer appliance.
What it does: Snowball allows large volumes of data to be securely transferred to AWS using physical devices.
When to use it: Used when transferring petabyte scale datasets or where network bandwidth is constrained.
Why it matters in New Zealand: Organisations with limited connectivity or large legacy datasets may require offline migration strategies to reduce project timelines.
Snowball with compute and storage.
Small, rugged edge data transfer device.
AWS Data Pipeline: Orchestrates data movement and transformation.
Networking and content delivery includes services that control connectivity, routing and traffic distribution. Many New Zealand organisations operate hybrid environments with on premises systems. Secure connectivity, predictable latency and controlled exposure to the public internet are key considerations when designing cloud networking strategies.
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud: Isolated virtual network for AWS resources.
What it does: VPC allows organisations to define IP ranges, subnets, routing tables and network access controls for their cloud workloads.
When to use it: Used in all production AWS environments to control traffic flow and segment workloads securely.
Why it matters in New Zealand: Network segmentation reduces attack surface and supports compliance with internal security frameworks and public sector governance expectations.
Amazon Route 53: Scalable DNS service with routing and health checks.
Route 53 Resolver: DNS resolver for inbound and outbound queries within VPCs.
Amazon CloudFront: Global CDN for low‑latency delivery.
Elastic Load Balancing: Distributes traffic across application, network or gateway load balancers.
AWS Direct Connect: Dedicated network connection from on-prem to AWS.
What it does: Direct Connect establishes private connectivity between an organisation’s data centre and AWS without traversing the public internet.
When to use it: Used for high bandwidth, low latency or regulated workloads requiring predictable network performance.
Misconception: Direct Connect replaces all internet connectivity and eliminates security risk.
Clarification: Direct Connect provides private connectivity to AWS, but organisations must still implement identity controls, encryption, network segmentation and monitoring to maintain secure operations.
Why it matters in New Zealand: Government agencies, healthcare providers and financial institutions often require private connectivity to support secure hybrid architectures.
AWS Transit Gateway: Central hub connecting VPCs and on‑prem networks.
AWS VPN: Site‑to‑site secure network connectivity.
AWS PrivateLink: Private access to AWS services without public endpoints.
AWS Global Accelerator: Routes users to healthy endpoints globally for better performance.
Security, identity and compliance covers services that manage authentication, encryption, monitoring and regulatory alignment. For government agencies and enterprises in New Zealand, identity governance and threat detection are foundational to protecting sensitive data and maintaining compliance with the Privacy Act and sector specific standards.
AWS Identity and Access Management: Fine-grained access control using users, roles and policies.
What it does: IAM defines who can access AWS resources and what actions they are permitted to perform. It supports role based access and multi factor authentication.
When to use it: Used in all AWS environments to enforce least privilege access and reduce unauthorised activity.
Why it matters in New Zealand: Organisations subject to the Privacy Act and sector regulations must demonstrate strong access governance. Proper IAM configuration supports audit and risk management requirements.
Centralised identity and access across AWS accounts and apps.
Amazon Cognito: User authentication and management for web and mobile apps.
AWS Key Management Service: Centralised encryption key management.
What it does: KMS enables organisations to create, manage and control encryption keys used to protect data across AWS services.
When to use it: Used whenever encrypting sensitive data at rest or in transit.
Why it matters in New Zealand: Encryption is a baseline expectation for protecting personal and regulated data. KMS supports controlled key lifecycle management and audit visibility.
AWS CloudHSM: Dedicated hardware security modules in the cloud.
AWS Secrets Manager: Secure storage and rotation of secrets.
AWS Certificate Manager: Provision and manage TLS/SSL certificates.
AWS GuardDuty: Continuous threat detection service.
Amazon Inspector: Automated vulnerability management.
AWS Macie: Sensitive data discovery and classification in S3.
AWS Security Hub: Centralised security findings and controls.
What it does: Security Hub aggregates security alerts and compliance status from multiple AWS services into a unified dashboard.
When to use it: Used to centralise visibility across complex or multi account AWS environments.
Why it matters in New Zealand: Centralised oversight supports enterprise governance and helps organisations demonstrate security monitoring capability during audits.
AWS Shield: DDoS protection service.
AWS Web Application Firewall: Protects web apps from common exploits.
AWS Artifact: Access to compliance reports and agreements.
Storage services determine how data is stored, archived and accessed across AWS environments. For New Zealand organisations managing personal information, financial records or health data, encryption, lifecycle management and region selection are essential for maintaining privacy and meeting compliance expectations.
Amazon Simple Storage Service: Scalable, durable object storage with lifecycle, encryption and access controls.
What it does: S3 stores large volumes of unstructured data such as backups, documents, media assets and analytics datasets. It supports multiple storage classes for cost optimisation.
When to use it: Used for data lakes, backup and recovery, long term archival and application storage.
Why it matters in New Zealand: Data stored in S3 must be configured with appropriate encryption, access policies and lifecycle controls to align with privacy and retention obligations under the Privacy Act.
Amazon S3 Glacier: Low‑cost archival storage with retrieval from minutes to hours.
Amazon Elastic Block Store: Persistent block storage for EC2 with snapshots and encryption.
Amazon Elastic File System: Scalable NFS file storage shared across instances.
Amazon FSx for Windows File Server: Managed Windows file system with SMB and Active Directory integration.
Amazon FSx for Lustre: High‑performance file system for HPC, ML, and media workloads with S3 integration.
AWS Storage Gateway: Hybrid storage connecting on‑prem environments to AWS.
Front-end web and mobile services support the development and hosting of web and mobile applications. Organisations delivering digital services to customers or citizens in New Zealand rely on secure, scalable front end platforms that integrate with backend systems and identity services.
AWS Amplify: Build, deploy, and host web and mobile apps.
Amazon Pinpoint: Multi‑channel customer engagement.
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AWS Premier Tier Services Partner status and AWS Managed Services Provider (MSP) accreditation, demonstrating deep, audited capability across migration, operations and optimisation.
AWS Premier Consulting Partner status, recognising our proven capability in managing large-scale migrations and complex cloud transformations.
AWS Migration Competency and other specialist competencies, reflecting experience delivering complex, multi‑phase migrations and modernisation projects for New Zealand customers.
Recognised expertise with the AWS Well‑Architected Framework, ensuring your AWS workloads are designed and run for security, reliability, performance, cost and sustainability.
A strategic collaboration with AWS focused on accelerating cloud migration and modernisation for New Zealand organisations, including the use of generative‑AI tools to streamline delivery.
A powerful combination of global innovation and deeply rooted local expertise
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An AWS Managed Services Partner provides ongoing operational management of cloud environments. This includes monitoring, incident response, patch management, security configuration, cost optimisation and governance enforcement. While AWS manages core infrastructure, an MSP ensures workloads remain secure, compliant and continuously improved over time.
The most effective approach depends on workload complexity, regulatory requirements and business objectives. Most organisations follow a structured migration framework that includes assessment, planning, migration execution and optimisation. Strategies typically align to the seven Rs of migration such as rehost, replatform, refactor, repurchase, retire, retain and relocate. Engaging an experienced AWS partner helps reduce operational risk and ensures migration aligns with security, cost management and governance goals.
AWS Marketplace enables organisations to discover, purchase and deploy third party software that runs on AWS. It integrates with AWS billing, supports private offers and simplifies licence management. For New Zealand enterprises and public sector agencies, it helps streamline procurement while maintaining financial and compliance controls.
AWS provides services and regional infrastructure that support compliance with New Zealand regulatory requirements. Compliance depends on how services are configured, where data is stored and how governance controls are implemented. Organisations must apply appropriate encryption, access management and monitoring policies to meet their specific legal and regulatory obligations.
Rehost: Move applications to AWS with minimal changes. Often called lift and shift.
Best for: Fast migration with limited budget or time constraints.
Replatform: Make targeted optimisations such as moving to managed databases.
Best for: Improving performance or cost efficiency without major redesign.
Refactor: Redesign the application to be cloud native.
Best for: Long term innovation, scalability and resilience.
Why this matters in New Zealand: Public sector and regulated organisations often begin with rehost to reduce risk, then move toward replatform or refactor as governance maturity improves.
AWS Consulting Partner: Provides advisory, design and implementation services.
Typically engaged during transformation projects.
AWS Managed Services Partner MSP: Provides ongoing operational management, monitoring, security oversight and optimisation.
Engaged for long term cloud operations.
Why this matters in New Zealand: Many organisations require both project delivery and ongoing governance support. Understanding the distinction helps avoid gaps in accountability.
AWS Marketplace: Software purchased through AWS billing.
Consolidated invoicing and simplified procurement.
Direct vendor licensing: Software purchased outside AWS.
Separate billing and contract management.
Why this matters in New Zealand: Marketplace procurement can simplify compliance reporting and financial oversight, particularly for large enterprises and government agencies.
Amazon EC2: Virtual servers with full operating system control.
Suitable for traditional applications and predictable workloads.
AWS Lambda: Serverless execution triggered by events.
Suitable for event driven architectures and variable workloads.
Why this matters in New Zealand: Choosing between EC2 and Lambda affects cost structure, operational overhead and governance controls.
Amazon ECS: Managed container orchestration tightly integrated with AWS. Simpler to operate for teams standardising on AWS.
Amazon EKS: Managed Kubernetes control plane.
Provides portability for organisations using Kubernetes across multiple environments.
Why this matters in New Zealand: Organisations with hybrid or multi cloud strategies often prefer Kubernetes based orchestration for consistency across environments.
AWS Direct Connect: Dedicated private network connection to AWS.
Higher performance and predictable latency.
AWS VPN: Encrypted connection over the public internet.
Faster to deploy and lower upfront cost.
Why this matters in New Zealand: Financial institutions and government agencies often use Direct Connect for critical systems, while VPN may be sufficient for smaller or temporary workloads.
Amazon RDS: Managed relational databases including MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server and Oracle.
Amazon Aurora: High performance relational database compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Designed for improved scalability and availability.
Why this matters in New Zealand: Organisations modernising legacy systems may start with RDS for familiarity, then adopt Aurora for performance or cost optimisation benefits.
Amazon S3: Object storage for large scale, durable data storage.
Common for backups, archives and analytics data.
Amazon EFS: Shared file storage accessible across multiple instances.
Suitable for shared application data.
Amazon EBS: Block storage attached to EC2 instances.
Used for databases and transactional workloads.
Why this matters in New Zealand: Storage selection affects compliance posture, performance and long term cost management.
Amazon Bedrock:Managed access to foundation models for generative AI applications.
Amazon SageMaker: End to end machine learning platform for building and deploying custom models.
Why this matters in New Zealand: Organisations experimenting with generative AI may begin with Bedrock for speed, while more advanced AI initiatives may require SageMaker for custom model development and governance control.
AWS Organizations: Multi account management and policy enforcement framework.
AWS Control Tower: Pre configured governance environment built on Organizations with automated guardrails.
Why this matters in New Zealand: Control Tower accelerates structured multi account setup, while Organizations provides deeper customisation for mature governance models.
AWS Snowball: Physical appliance for large scale data transfer into AWS.
AWS DataSync: Network based automated data transfer service.
Why this matters in New Zealand: For very large datasets or limited connectivity environments, Snowball may be appropriate. For ongoing or incremental transfers, DataSync is typically more efficient.