AWS Glossary

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Numbers and symbols

100-continue: A method that gives a client the ability to see whether a server can accept a request before actually sending it. For large PUT requests, this method can save both time and bandwidth charges.

A

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AAD

See additional authenticated data.

access control list (ACL)

A document that defines who can access a particular bucket or object. Each bucket and object in Amazon S3 has an ACL. This document defines what each type of user can do, such as write and read permissions.

access identifiers

See credentials.

access key

The combination of an access key ID (for example, AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE) and a secret access key (for example, wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY). You use access keys to sign API requests that you make to AWS.

access key ID

A unique identifier that's associated with a secret access key; the access key ID and secret access key are used together to sign programmatic AWS requests cryptographically.

access key rotation

A method to increase security by changing the AWS access key ID. You can use this method to retire an old key at your discretion.

access policy language

A language for writing documents (specifically, policies) that specify who can access a particular AWS resource and under what conditions.

account

A formal relationship with AWS that's associated with all of the following:

The owner email address and password
The control of resources created under its umbrella
Payment for the AWS activity related to those resources

The AWS account has permission to do anything and everything with all the AWS account resources. This is in contrast to a user, which is an entity contained within the account.

account activity

A webpage showing your month-to-date AWS usage and costs. The account activity page is located at https://aws.amazon.com/account-activity/.

AWS Account Management

AWS Account Management is a tool that you can use to update the contact information for each of your AWS accounts.

ACL

See access control list (ACL).

ACM

AWS Certificate Manager is a web service for provisioning, managing, and deploying Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificates for use with AWS services.

action

An API function. Also called operation or call. The activity the principal has permission to perform. The action is B in the statement "A has permission to do B to C where D applies." For example, Jane sends a request to Amazon SQS with Action=ReceiveMessage.

CloudWatch: The response initiated by the change in an alarm's state (for example, from OK to ALARM). The state change might be caused by a metric reaching the alarm threshold, or by a SetAlarmState request. Each alarm can have one or more actions assigned to each state. Actions are performed once each time the alarm changes to a state that has an action assigned. Example actions include an Amazon SNS notification, running an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling policy, and an Amazon EC2 instance stop/terminate action.

active trusted key groups

A list that shows each of the trusted key groups, and the IDs of the public keys in each key group, that are active for a distribution in Amazon CloudFront. CloudFront can use the public keys in these key groups to verify the signatures of CloudFront signed URLs and signed cookies.

active trusted signers

See active trusted key groups.

active-active

A class of high availability strategies in which a workload exists simultaneously in multiple Regions, uses multiple primary resources, and serves traffic from all of the Regions to which it's deployed. Sometimes referred to as active/active.

active-passive

A class of disaster recovery strategies that involve a primary Region and a standby Region in a back up and restore, hot standby, pilot light, or warm standby configuration. Sometimes referred to as active/passive.

additional authenticated data

Information that's checked for integrity but not encrypted, such as headers or other contextual metadata.

administrative suspension

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling might suspend processes for Auto Scaling group that repeatedly fail to launch instances. Auto Scaling groups that most commonly experience administrative suspension have zero running instances, have been trying to launch instances for more than 24 hours, and have not succeeded in that time.

alarm

An item that watches a single metric over a specified time period and starts an Amazon SNS topic or an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling policy. These actions are started if the value of the metric crosses a threshold value over a predetermined number of time periods.

allow

One of two possible outcomes (the other is deny) when an IAM access policy is evaluated. When a user makes a request to AWS, AWS evaluates the request based on all permissions that apply to the user and then returns either allow or deny.

Amazon Machine Image (AMI)

An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is an encrypted machine image stored in Amazon EBS or Amazon S3. AMIs function similarly to a template of a computer's root drive. They contain the operating system and can also include software and layers of your application, such as database servers, middleware, and web servers.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

An infrastructure web services platform in the cloud for companies of all sizes.

AMI

See Amazon Machine Image (AMI).

Amplify

AWS Amplify is a complete solution that frontend web and mobile developers can use to build and deploy secure, scalable full-stack applications powered by AWS. Amplify provides two services: Amplify Hosting and Amplify Studio.

Amplify Android

Amplify Android is a collection of open-source client libraries that provides interfaces for specific use cases across many AWS services. Amplify Android is the recommended way to build native Android applications powered by AWS.

Amplify Hosting

AWS Amplify Hosting is a fully managed continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) and hosting service for fast, secure, and reliable static and server-side rendered apps. Amplify Hosting provides a Git-based workflow for hosting full-stack serverless web apps with continuous deployment.

Amplify iOS

Amplify iOS is a collection of open-source client libraries that provides interfaces for specific use cases across many AWS services. Amplify iOS is the recommended way to build native iOS applications powered by AWS.

Amplify Studio

AWS Amplify Studio is a visual development environment that web and mobile developers can use to build the frontend UI components and the backend environment for a full-stack application.

analysis rules

AWS Clean Rooms: The query restrictions that authorize a specific type of query.

analysis scheme

CloudSearch: Language-specific text analysis options that are applied to a text field to control stemming and configure stopwords and synonyms.

API Gateway

Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service that developers can use to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale.

AWS App2Container

AWS App2Container is a transformation tool that modernizes .NET and Java applications by migrating them into containerized applications.

AWS AppConfig

AWS AppConfig is a service used to update software at runtime without deploying new code. With AWS AppConfig, you can configure, validate, and deploy feature flags and application configurations.

Amazon AppFlow

Amazon AppFlow is a fully managed integration service that you can use to transfer data securely between software as a service (SaaS) applications and AWS services.

application

Elastic Beanstalk: A logical collection of components, including environments, versions, and environment configurations. An application is conceptually similar to a folder.

CodeDeploy: A name that uniquely identifies the application to be deployed. AWS CodeDeploy uses this name to ensure the correct combination of revision, deployment configuration, and deployment group are referenced during a deployment.

Application Auto Scaling

AWS Application Auto Scaling is a web service that you can use to configure automatic scaling for AWS resources beyond Amazon EC2, such as Amazon ECS services, Amazon EMR clusters, and DynamoDB tables.

Application Billing

The location where your customers manage the Amazon DevPay products they've purchased. The web address is http://www.amazon.com/dp-applications.

Application Composer

AWS Application Composer is a visual designer that you can use to build serverless applications from multiple AWS services. As you design an application, Application Composer automatically generates a YAML template with CloudFormation and AWS SAM template resources.

Application Cost Profiler

AWS Application Cost Profiler is a solution to track the consumption of shared AWS resources used by software applications and report granular cost breakdown across tenant base.

Application Discovery Service

AWS Application Discovery Service is a web service that helps you plan to migrate to AWS by identifying IT assets in a data center—including servers, virtual machines, applications, application dependencies, and network infrastructure.

application revision

CodeDeploy: An archive file containing source content—such as source code, webpages, executable files, and deployment scripts—along with an application specification file. Revisions are stored in Amazon S3 buckets or GitHub repositories. For Amazon S3, a revision is uniquely identified by its Amazon S3 object key and its ETag, version, or both. For GitHub, a revision is uniquely identified by its commit ID.

application specification file

CodeDeploy: A YAML-formatted file used to map the source files in an application revision to destinations on the instance. The file is also used to specify custom permissions for deployed files and specify scripts to be run on each instance at various stages of the deployment process.

application version

Elastic Beanstalk: A specific, labeled iteration of an application that represents a functionally consistent set of deployable application code. A version points to an Amazon S3 object (a JAVA WAR file) that contains the application code.

AppSpec file

See application specification file.

WorkSpaces Applications

Amazon WorkSpaces Applications is a fully managed, secure service for streaming desktop applications to users without rewriting those applications.

AWS AppSync

AWS AppSync is an enterprise-level, fully managed GraphQL service with real-time data synchronization and offline programming features.

ARN

See Amazon Resource Name (ARN).

artifact

CodePipeline: A copy of the files or changes that are worked on by the pipeline.

asymmetric encryption

Encryption that uses both a public key and a private key.

asynchronous bounce

A type of bounce that occurs when a receiver initially accepts an email message for delivery and then subsequently fails to deliver it.

Athena

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that you can use to analyze data in Amazon S3 using ANSI SQL. Athena is serverless, so there's no infrastructure to manage. Athena scales automatically and is simple to use, so you can start analyzing your datasets within seconds.

atomic counter

DynamoDB: A method of incrementing or decrementing the value of an existing attribute without interfering with other write requests.

attribute

A fundamental data element, something that doesn't need to be broken down any further. In DynamoDB, attributes are similar in many ways to fields or columns in other database systems.

Amazon Machine Learning: A unique, named property within an observation in a dataset. In tabular data, such as spreadsheets or comma-separated values (.csv) files, the column headings represent the attributes, and the rows contain values for each attribute.

AUC

Area Under a Curve. An industry-standard metric to evaluate the quality of a binary classification machine learning model. AUC measures the ability of the model to predict a higher score for positive examples, those that are “correct,” than for negative examples, those that are “incorrect.” The AUC metric returns a decimal value from 0 to 1. AUC values near 1 indicate an ML model that's highly accurate.

Aurora

Amazon Aurora is a fully managed MySQL-compatible relational database engine that combines the speed and availability of commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open-source databases.

authenticated encryption

Encryption that provides confidentiality, data integrity, and authenticity assurances of the encrypted data.

authentication

The process of proving your identity to a system.

AWS Auto Scaling

AWS Auto Scaling is a fully managed service that you can use to quickly discover the scalable AWS resources that are part of your application and to configure dynamic scaling.

Auto Scaling group

A representation of multiple EC2 instances that share similar characteristics, and that are treated as a logical grouping for the purposes of instance scaling and management.

Availability Zone

A distinct location within a Region that's insulated from failures in other Availability Zones, and provides inexpensive, low-latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same Region.

AWS

See Amazon Web Services (AWS).

B

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back up and restore

A disaster recovery strategy in which backups of data in the primary Region are copied to a standby Region and can be restored from the standby Region. You must provision the infrastructure and other resources, such as compute, as part of a failover process.

Backint Agent

AWS Backint Agent for SAP HANA is an SAP-certified backup and restore solution for SAP HANA workloads running on Amazon EC2 instances in the cloud.

AWS Backup

AWS Backup is a managed backup service that you can use to centralize and automate the backup of data across AWS services in the cloud and on premises.

basic monitoring

Monitoring of AWS provided metrics derived at a 5-minute frequency.

batch

See document batch.

batch prediction

Amazon Machine Learning: An operation that processes multiple input data observations at one time (asynchronously). Unlike real-time predictions, batch predictions aren't available until all predictions have been processed.

C

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cache cluster

A logical cache distributed over multiple cache nodes. A cache cluster can be set up with a specific number of cache nodes.

cache cluster identifier

Customer-supplied identifier for the cache cluster that must be unique for that customer in an AWS Region.

cache engine version

The version of the Memcached service that's running on the cache node.

cache node

A fixed-size chunk of secure, network-attached RAM. Each cache node runs an instance of the Memcached service, and has its own DNS name and port. Multiple types of cache nodes are supported, each with varying amounts of associated memory.

cache node type

An EC2 instance type used to run the cache node.

cache parameter group

A container for cache engine parameter values that can be applied to one or more cache clusters.

cache security group

A group maintained by ElastiCache that combines inbound authorizations to cache nodes for hosts belonging to Amazon EC2 security groups that are specified through the console or the API or command line tools.

campaign

Amazon Personalize: A deployed solution version (trained model) with provisioned dedicated transaction capacity for creating real-time recommendations for your application users. After you create a campaign, you use the getRecommendations or getPersonalizedRanking personalization operations to get recommendations.

D

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dashboard

See service health dashboard.

data consistency

A concept that describes when data is written or updated successfully and all copies of the data are updated in all AWS Regions. However, it takes time for the data to propagate to all storage locations. To support varied application requirements, DynamoDB supports both eventually consistent and strongly consistent reads.