Glossary of Terms

This glossary provides explanations and definitions of terms commonly found in this Help Center. In some instances, definitions may be specific to how terms are used and understood by Zesty.

• Reserved Instances (RIs) - A form of financial commitment to specific usage of compute services within AWS, defined by region and instance type. Offers the best available discounts in exchange for limited flexibility. These are bought for 1 year or 3 year terms.
• Savings Plans (SPs) - A form of financial commitment to a specific dollar amount over a variety of EC2 instances over a 1 year or 3 year term. Offers more limited discounts in exchange for a greater degree of flexibility.
• IAM Role - Identity and Access Management roles can be configured in AWS and specify permissions needed for different tasks, allowing for organizations to only permit different users and entities the minimum level of access required to perform necessary functions. See required IAM permissions to get started with Zesty here.
• RI Marketplace - Unlike Savings Plans which are required to be held for the full 1 year or 3 year terms, RIs have a secondary marketplace i.e. a trading platform, operated regionally, where customers can buy and sell Reserved Instances before the end of their predefined terms.
• Root User - The original identity, defined by an email address, used to create your AWS account. It has complete access to all AWS services and resources included a small number not granted to any other user, including those with administrator access. If you are unsure, you can find steps to identify your root user here.
• Master Payer Account - The account that manages access and typically consolidates billing data for an AWS organization.
• OS - Operating System; most commonly linux or mswin.
• Region - AWS defines their regions as 'separate geographic areas that AWS uses to house its infrastructure'. As of 2022, there are 26 regions operating, each with multiple infrastructure sites. Several AWS products and features are region locked, including RIs.
• POC - Proof of Concept. For Commitment Manager, this means doing a preliminary onboarding which provides Zesty with access to your EC2 instance metadata and provides you with a Potential Savings Report.
• Over-provisioning - Having (and consequently, paying for) more commitments than what is required to cover workloads.
• Waste - Cloud resources which are bought and provisioned, but not used optimally.
• EC2 - Elastic Compute Cloud. AWS's flagship compute product, with a variety of instance types and families configured and optimized to suit different needs.
• EBS - AWS native block storage solution.
• S3 - AWS native object storage solution.
• RDS - AWS Relational Database Service; a managed database service using SQL.
• Old Gen Instances - AWS is constantly improving and upgrading their services and infrastructure. As such, they periodically introduce new instance types to replace older generation (or ‘old gen’) types, eg: M1 and M3 instances have been retired in favor of the newer M5 instance type. When AWS retires an instance type, they also stop selling the Reserved Instances to cover them.
• Commitments - General term for any sort of long term financial commitment to use specific AWS services to discount on-demand equivalent costs. Includes both RIs and SPs.
• Steady State - The base level of EC2 usage which is not subject to spikes and dips. For Zesty, we define this based on a 30 day rolling window and consider the lowest usage in this period to be your 'steady state', which we then cover with RIs.