AWS Glossary

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Numbers and Symbols

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

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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. The 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 (like AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE) and a secret access key (like 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. This method enables you to retire an old key at your discretion.

access policy language

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

account

A formal relationship with AWS that is associated with (1) the owner email address and password, (2) the control of resources created under its umbrella, and (3) 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 web page showing your month-to-date AWS usage and costs. The account activity page is located at https://aws.amazon.com/account-activity/.

ACL

See access control list (ACL).

ACM

See AWS Certificate Manager (ACM).

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.

Amazon CloudWatch: The response initiated by the change in an alarm's state: for example, from OK to ALARM. The state change may be triggered 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, such as an Amazon Simple Notification Service notification, an Auto Scaling policy execution or an Amazon EC2 instance stop/terminate action.

active trusted signers

A list showing each of the trusted signers you've specified and the IDs of the corresponding active key pairs that Amazon CloudFront is aware of. To be able to create working signed URLs, a trusted signer must appear in this list with at least one key pair ID.

additional authenticated data

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

administrative suspension

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 triggers an Amazon SNS topic or an Auto Scaling policy 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 API Gateway

A fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale.

Amazon AppStream

A web service for streaming existing Windows applications from the cloud to any device.

Amazon Aurora

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.

Amazon CloudFront

An AWS content delivery service that helps you improve the performance, reliability, and availability of your websites and applications.

Amazon CloudSearch

A fully managed service in the AWS cloud that makes it easy to set up, manage, and scale a search solution for your website or application.

Amazon CloudWatch

A web service that enables you to monitor and manage various metrics, and configure alarm actions based on data from those metrics.

Amazon CloudWatch Events

A web service that enables you to deliver a timely stream of system events that describe changes in AWS resources to AWS Lambda functions, streams in Amazon Kinesis Streams, Amazon Simple Notification Service topics, or built-in targets.

Amazon CloudWatch Logs

A web service for monitoring and troubleshooting your systems and applications from your existing system, application, and custom log files. You can send your existing log files to CloudWatch Logs and monitor these logs in near real-time.

Amazon Cognito

A web service that makes it easy to save mobile user data, such as app preferences or game state, in the AWS cloud without writing any back-end code or managing any infrastructure. Amazon Cognito offers mobile identity management and data synchronization across devices.

Amazon DevPay

An easy-to-use online billing and account management service that makes it easy for you to sell an Amazon EC2 AMI or an application built on Amazon S3.

B

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basic monitoring

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

batch

See document batch.

BGP ASN

Border Gateway Protocol Autonomous System Number. A unique identifier for a network, for use in BGP routing. Amazon EC2 supports all 2-byte ASN numbers in the range of 1 – 65335, with the exception of 7224, which is reserved.

batch prediction

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

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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 is 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 ingress authorizations to cache nodes for hosts belonging to Amazon EC2 security groups specified through the console or the API or command line tools.

canned access policy

A standard access control policy that you can apply to a bucket or object. Options include: private, public-read, public-read-write, and authenticated-read.

canonicalization

The process of converting data into a standard format that a service such as Amazon S3 can recognize.

capacity

The amount of available compute size at a given time. Each Auto Scaling group is defined with a minimum and maximum compute size. A scaling activity increases or decreases the capacity within the defined minimum and maximum values.

cartesian product processor

A processor that calculates a cartesian product. Also known as a cartesian data processor.

cartesian product

A mathematical operation that returns a product from multiple sets.

certificate

A credential that some AWS products use to authenticate AWS accounts and users. Also known as an X.509 certificate . The certificate is paired with a private key.

chargeable resources

Features or services whose use incurs fees. Although some AWS products are free, others include charges. For example, in an AWS CloudFormation stack, AWS resources that have been created incur charges. The amount charged depends on the usage load. Use the Amazon Web Services Simple Monthly Calculator at http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html to estimate your cost prior to creating instances, stacks, or other resources.

CIDR block

Classless Inter-Domain Routing. An Internet protocol address allocation and route aggregation methodology.

See Also Classless Inter-Domain Routing in Wikipedia.

ciphertext

Information that has been encrypted, as opposed to plaintext, which is information that has not.

ClassicLink

A feature for linking an EC2-Classic instance to a VPC, allowing your EC2-Classic instance to communicate with VPC instances using private IP addresses.

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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, Amazon DynamoDB supports both eventually consistent and strongly consistent reads.

data node

Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES): An Elasticsearch instance that holds data and responds to data upload requests.

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EBS

See Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS).

EC2

See Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

EC2 compute unit

An AWS standard for compute CPU and memory. You can use this measure to evaluate the CPU capacity of different EC2 instance types.

EC2 instance

A compute instance in the Amazon EC2 service. Other AWS services use the term EC2 instance to distinguish these instances from other types of instances they support.

ECR

See Amazon EC2 Container Registry (Amazon ECR).

ECS

See Amazon EC2 Container Service (Amazon ECS).

edge location

A site that CloudFront uses to cache copies of your content for faster delivery to users at any location.

EFS

See Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS).

Elastic

A company that provides open-source solutions—including Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, and Beats—that are designed to take data from any source and search, analyze, and visualize it in real time.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES) is an AWS-managed service for deploying, operating, and scaling Elasticsearch in the AWS Cloud.

Elastic Block Store

See Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS).

Elastic IP address

A fixed (static) IP address that you have allocated in Amazon EC2 or Amazon VPC and then attached to an instance. Elastic IP addresses are associated with your account, not a specific instance. They are elastic because you can easily allocate, attach, detach, and free them as your needs change. Unlike traditional static IP addresses, Elastic IP addresses allow you to mask instance or Availability Zone failures by rapidly remapping your public IP addresses to another instance.

Elastic Load Balancing

A web service that improves an application's availability by distributing incoming traffic between two or more EC2 instances.

elastic network interface

An additional network interface that can be attached to an instance. ENIs include a primary private IP address, one or more secondary private IP addresses, an elastic IP address (optional), a MAC address, membership in specified security groups, a description, and a source/destination check flag. You can create an ENI, attach it to an instance, detach it from an instance, and attach it to another instance.

Elasticsearch

An open source, real-time distributed search and analytics engine used for full-text search, structured search, and analytics. Elasticsearch was developed by the Elastic company.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES) is an AWS-managed service for deploying, operating, and scaling Elasticsearch in the AWS Cloud.

EMR

See Amazon EMR (Amazon EMR).

encrypt

To use a mathematical algorithm to make data unintelligible to unauthorized users while allowing authorized users a method (such as a key or password) to convert the altered data back to its original state.

encryption context

A set of key–value pairs that contains additional information associated with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS)–encrypted information.

endpoint

A URL that identifies a host and port as the entry point for a web service. Every web service request contains an endpoint. Most AWS products provide regional endpoints to enable faster connectivity.

Amazon ElastiCache: The DNS name of a cache node.

Amazon RDS: The DNS name of a DB instance.

AWS CloudFormation: The DNS name or IP address of the server that receives an HTTP request.

endpoint port

Amazon ElastiCache: The port number used by a cache node.

Amazon RDS: The port number used by a DB instance.

envelope encryption

The use of a master key and a data key to algorithmically protect data. The master key is used to encrypt and decrypt the data key and the data key is used to encrypt and decrypt the data itself.

environment

AWS Elastic Beanstalk: A specific running instance of an application. The application has a CNAME and includes an application version and a customizable configuration (which is inherited from the default container type).

environment configuration

A collection of parameters and settings that define how an environment and its associated resources behave.

ephemeral store

See instance store.

epoch

The date from which time is measured. For most Unix environments, the epoch is January 1, 1970.

evaluation

Amazon Machine Learning: The process of measuring the predictive performance of a machine learning (ML) model.

Also a machine learning object that stores the details and result of an ML model evaluation.

evaluation datasource

The data that Amazon Machine Learning uses to evaluate the predictive accuracy of a machine learning model.

eventual consistency

The method through which AWS products achieve high availability, which involves replicating data across multiple servers in Amazon's data centers. When data is written or updated and Success is returned, all copies of the data are updated. However, it takes time for the data to propagate to all storage locations. The data will eventually be consistent, but an immediate read might not show the change. Consistency is usually reached within seconds.

eventually consistent read

A read process that returns data from only one region and might not show the most recent write information. However, if you repeat your read request after a short time, the response should eventually return the latest data.

eviction

The deletion by CloudFront of an object from an edge location before its expiration time. If an object in an edge location isn't frequently requested, CloudFront might evict the object (remove the object before its expiration date) to make room for objects that are more popular.

exbibyte

A contraction of exa binary byte, an exbibyte is 2^60 or 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes. An exabyte (EB) is 10^18 or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. 1,024 EiB is a zebibyte.

expiration

For CloudFront caching, the time when CloudFront stops responding to user requests with an object. If you don't use headers or CloudFront distribution settings to specify how long you want objects to stay in an edge location, the objects expire after 24 hours. The next time a user requests an object that has expired, CloudFront forwards the request to the origin.

explicit launch permission

An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) launch permission granted to a specific AWS account.

exponential backoff

A strategy that incrementally increases the wait between retry attempts in order to reduce the load on the system and increase the likelihood that repeated requests will succeed. For example, client applications might wait up to 400 milliseconds before attempting the first retry, up to 1600 milliseconds before the second, up to 6400 milliseconds (6.4 seconds) before the third, and so on.

expression

Amazon CloudSearch: A numeric expression that you can use to control how search hits are sorted. You can construct Amazon CloudSearch expressions using numeric fields, other rank expressions, a document's default relevance score, and standard numeric operators and functions. When you use the sort option to specify an expression in a search request, the expression is evaluated for each search hit and the hits are listed according to their expression values.

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facet: Amazon CloudSearch: An index field that represents a category that you want to use to refine and filter search results.
facet enabled: Amazon CloudSearch: An index field option that enables facet information to be calculated for the field.
FBL: See feedback loop.
feature transformation: Amazon Machine Learning: The machine learning process of constructing more predictive input representations or “features” from the raw input variables to optimize a machine learning model’s ability to learn and generalize. Also known as data transformation or feature engineering.
federated identity management: Allows individuals to sign in to different networks or services, using the same group or personal credentials to access data across all networks. With identity federation in AWS, external identities (federated users) are granted secure access to resources in an AWS account without having to create IAM users. These external identities can come from a corporate identity store (such as LDAP or Windows Active Directory) or from a third party (such as Login with Amazon, Facebook, or Google). AWS federation also supports SAML 2.0.
federated user: See federated identity management.
federation: See federated identity management.
feedback loop: The mechanism by which a mailbox provider (for example, an Internet service provider) forwards a recipient's complaint back to the sender.
field weight: The relative importance of a text field in a search index. Field weights control how much matches in particular text fields affect a document's relevance score.
filter: A criterion that you specify to limit the results when you list or describe your Amazon EC2 resources.
filter query: A way to filter search results without affecting how the results are scored and sorted. Specified with the Amazon CloudSearch fq parameter.
FIM: See federated identity management.
Firehose: See Amazon Kinesis Firehose.
format version: See template format version.
forums: See discussion forums.
function: See intrinsic function.
fuzzy search: A simple search query that uses approximate string matching (fuzzy matching) to correct for typographical errors and misspellings.

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geospatial search

A search query that uses locations specified as a latitude and longitude to determine matches and sort the results.

gibibyte

A contraction of giga binary byte, a gibibyte is 2^30 or 1,073,741,824 bytes. A gigabyte (GB) is 10^9 or 1,000,000,000 bytes. 1,024 GiB is a tebibyte.

global secondary index

An index with a partition key and a sort key that can be different from those on the table. A global secondary index is considered global because queries on the index can span all of the data in a table, across all partitions.

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Hadoop

Software that enables distributed processing for big data by using clusters and simple programming models. For more information, see http://hadoop.apache.org.

hard bounce

A persistent email delivery failure such as "mailbox does not exist."

hardware VPN

A hardware-based IPsec VPN connection over the Internet.

health check

A system call to check on the health status of each instance in an Auto Scaling group.

high-quality email

Email that recipients find valuable and want to receive. Value means different things to different recipients and can come in the form of offers, order confirmations, receipts, newsletters, etc.

highlights

Amazon CloudSearch: Excerpts returned with search results that show where the search terms appear within the text of the matching documents.

highlight enabled

Amazon CloudSearch: An index field option that enables matches within the field to be highlighted.

hit

A document that matches the criteria specified in a search request. Also referred to as a search result.

HMAC

Hash-based Message Authentication Code. A specific construction for calculating a message authentication code (MAC) involving a cryptographic hash function in combination with a secret key. You can use it to verify both the data integrity and the authenticity of a message at the same time. AWS calculates the HMAC using a standard, cryptographic hash algorithm, such as SHA-256.

hosted zone

A collection of resource record sets that Amazon Route 53 hosts. Like a traditional DNS zone file, a hosted zone represents a collection of records that are managed together under a single domain name.

HVM virtualization

Hardware Virtual Machine virtualization. Allows the guest VM to run as though it is on a native hardware platform, except that it still uses paravirtual (PV) network and storage drivers for improved performance.

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IAM: See AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM).
IAM group: See group.
IAM policy simulator: See policy simulator.
IAM role: See role.
IAM user: See user.
Identity and Access Management: See AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM).
identity provider (IdP): An IAM entity that holds metadata about external identity providers.
IdP: See identity provider (IdP) .
image: See Amazon Machine Image (AMI).
import/export station: A machine that uploads or downloads your data to or from Amazon S3.
import log: A report that contains details about how AWS Import/Export processed your data.
index: See search index.
index field: A name–value pair that is included in an Amazon CloudSearch domain's index. An index field can contain text or numeric data, dates, or a location.
indexing options: Configuration settings that define an Amazon CloudSearch domain's index fields, how document data is mapped to those index fields, and how the index fields can be used.
inline policy: An IAM policy that is embedded in a single IAM user, group, or role.
input data: Amazon Machine Learning: The observations that you provide to Amazon Machine Learning to train and evaluate a machine learning model and generate predictions.
instance: A copy of an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) running as a virtual server in the AWS cloud.
instance family: A general instance type grouping using either storage or CPU capacity.
instance group: A Hadoop cluster contains one master instance group that contains one master node, a core instance group containing one or more core node and an optional task node instance group, which can contain any number of task nodes.
instance profile: A container that passes IAM role information to an EC2 instance at launch.
instance store: Disk storage that is physically attached to the host computer for an EC2 instance, and therefore has the same lifespan as the instance. When the instance is terminated, you lose any data in the instance store.
instance store-backed AMI: A type of Amazon Machine Image (AMI) whose instances use an instance store volume as the root device. Compare this with instances launched from Amazon EBS-backed AMIs, which use an Amazon EBS volume as the root device.
instance type: A specification that defines the memory, CPU, storage capacity, and hourly cost for an instance. Some instance types are designed for standard applications, whereas others are designed for CPU-intensive, memory-intensive applications, and so on.
Internet gateway: Connects a network to the Internet. You can route traffic for IP addresses outside your VPC to the Internet gateway.
Internet service provider: A company that provides subscribers with access to the Internet. Many ISPs are also mailbox providers. Mailbox providers are sometimes referred to as ISPs, even if they only provide mailbox services.
intrinsic function: A special action in a AWS CloudFormation template that assigns values to properties not available until runtime. These functions follow the format Fn::Attribute, such as Fn::GetAtt. Arguments for intrinsic functions can be parameters, pseudo parameters, or the output of other intrinsic functions.
IP address: A numerical address (for example, 192.0.2.44) that networked devices use to communicate with one another using the Internet Protocol (IP). All EC2 instances are assigned two IP addresses at launch, which are directly mapped to each other through network address translation (NAT): a private IP address (following RFC 1918) and a public IP address. Instances launched in a VPC are assigned only a private IP address. Instances launched in your default VPC are assigned both a private IP address and a public IP address.
IP match condition: AWS WAF: An attribute that specifies the IP addresses or IP address ranges that web requests originate from. Based on the specified IP addresses, you can configure AWS WAF to allow or block web requests to AWS resources such as Amazon CloudFront distributions.
ISP: See Internet service provider.
issuer: The person who writes a policy to grant permissions to a resource. The issuer (by definition) is always the resource owner. AWS does not permit Amazon SQS users to create policies for resources they don't own. If John is the resource owner, AWS authenticates John's identity when he submits the policy he's written to grant permissions for that resource.
item: A group of attributes that is uniquely identifiable among all of the other items. Items in Amazon DynamoDB are similar in many ways to rows, records, or tuples in other database systems.

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job flow

Amazon EMR: One or more steps that specify all of the functions to be performed on the data.

job ID

A five-character, alphanumeric string that uniquely identifies an AWS Import/Export storage device in your shipment. AWS issues the job ID in response to a CREATE JOB email command.

job prefix

An optional string that you can add to the beginning of an AWS Import/Export log file name to prevent collisions with objects of the same name.

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key: A credential that identifies an AWS account or user to AWS (such as the AWS secret access key).; Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon EMR (Amazon EMR): The unique identifier for an object in a bucket. Every object in a bucket has exactly one key. Because a bucket and key together uniquely identify each object, you can think of Amazon S3 as a basic data map between the bucket + key, and the object itself. You can uniquely address every object in Amazon S3 through the combination of the web service endpoint, bucket name, and key, as in this example: http://doc.s3.amazonaws.com/2006-03-01/AmazonS3.wsdl, where doc is the name of the bucket, and 2006-03-01/AmazonS3.wsdl is the key.; AWS Import/Export: The name of an object in Amazon S3. It is a sequence of Unicode characters whose UTF-8 encoding cannot exceed 1024 bytes. If a key, for example, logPrefix + import-log-JOBID, is longer than 1024 bytes, AWS Elastic Beanstalk returns an InvalidManifestField error.; IAM: In a policy, a specific characteristic that is the basis for restricting access (such as the current time, or the IP address of the requester).; Tagging resources: A general tag label that acts like a category for more specific tag values. For example, you might have EC2 instance with the tag key of Owner and the tag value of Jan. You can tag an AWS resource with up to 10 key–value pairs. Not all AWS resources can be tagged.
key pair: A set of security credentials that you use to prove your identity electronically. A key pair consists of a private key and a public key.
key prefix: A logical grouping of the objects in a bucket. The prefix value is similar to a directory name that enables you to store similar data under the same directory in a bucket.
kibibyte: A contraction of kilo binary byte, a kibibyte is 2^10 or 1,024 bytes. A kilobyte (KB) is 10^3 or 1,000 bytes. 1,024 KiB is a mebibyte.
KMS: See AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS).

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labeled data

In machine learning, data for which you already know the target or “correct” answer.

launch configuration

A set of descriptive parameters used to create new EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling activity.

A template that an Auto Scaling group uses to launch new EC2 instances. The launch configuration contains information such as the Amazon Machine Image (AMI) ID, the instance type, key pairs, security groups, and block device mappings, among other configuration settings.

launch permission

An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) attribute that allows users to launch an AMI.

lifecycle

The lifecycle state of the EC2 instance contained in an Auto Scaling group. EC2 instances progress through several states over their lifespan; these include Pending, InService, Terminating and Terminated.

lifecycle action

An action that can be paused by Auto Scaling, such as launching or terminating an EC2 instance.

lifecycle hook

Enables you to pause Auto Scaling after it launches or terminates an EC2 instance so that you can perform a custom action while the instance is not in service.

link to VPC

The process of linking (or attaching) an EC2-Classic instance to a ClassicLink-enabled VPC.

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Mail Transfer Agent (MTA)

Software that transports email messages from one computer to another by using a client-server architecture.

mailbox provider

An organization that provides email mailbox hosting services. Mailbox providers are sometimes referred to as Internet service providers, even if they only provide mailbox services.

mailbox simulator

A set of email addresses that you can use to test an Amazon SES-based email sending application without sending messages to actual recipients. Each email address represents a specific scenario (such as a bounce or complaint) and generates a typical response that is specific to the scenario.

main route table

The default route table that any new VPC subnet uses for routing. You can associate a subnet with a different route table of your choice. You can also change which route table is the main route table.

managed policy

A standalone IAM policy that you can attach to multiple users, groups, and roles in your IAM account. Managed policies can either be AWS managed policies (which are created and managed by AWS) or customer managed policies (which you create and manage in your AWS account).

manifest

When sending a create job request for an import or export operation, you describe your job in a text file called a manifest. The manifest file is a YAML-formatted file that specifies how to transfer data between your storage device and the AWS cloud.

manifest file

Amazon Machine Learning: The file used for describing batch predictions. The manifest file relates each input data file with its associated batch prediction results. It is stored in the Amazon S3 output location.

mapping

A way to add conditional parameter values to an AWS CloudFormation template. You specify mappings in the template's optional Mappings section and retrieve the desired value using the FN::FindInMap function.

marker

See pagination token.

master node

A process running on an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that keeps track of the work its core and task nodes complete.

maximum price

The maximum price you will pay to launch one or more Spot Instances. If your maximum price exceeds the current Spot price and your restrictions are met, Amazon EC2 launches instances on your behalf.

maximum send rate

The maximum number of email messages that you can send per second using Amazon SES.

mebibyte

A contraction of mega binary byte, a mebibyte is 2^20 or 1,048,576 bytes. A megabyte (MB) is 10^6 or 1,000,000 bytes. 1,024 MiB is a gibibyte.

member resources

See resource.

message ID

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES): A unique identifier that is assigned to every email message that is sent.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS): The identifier returned when you send a message to a queue.

metadata

Information about other data or objects. In Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon EMR (Amazon EMR) metadata takes the form of name–value pairs that describe the object. These include default metadata such as the date last modified and standard HTTP metadata such as Content-Type. Users can also specify custom metadata at the time they store an object. In Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) metadata includes data about an EC2 instance that the instance can retrieve to determine things about itself, such as the instance type, the IP address, and so on.

metric

An element of time-series data defined by a unique combination of exactly one namespace, exactly one metric name, and between zero and ten dimensions. Metrics and the statistics derived from them are the basis of Amazon CloudWatch.

metric name

The primary identifier of a metric, used in combination with a namespace and optional dimensions.

MFA

See multi-factor authentication (MFA).

micro instance

A type of EC2 instance that is more economical to use if you have occasional bursts of high CPU activity.

MIME

See Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME).

ML model

In machine learning (ML), a mathematical model that generates predictions by finding patterns in data. Amazon Machine Learning supports three types of ML models: binary classification, multiclass classification, and regression. Also known as a predictive model.

See Also binary classification model, multiclass classification model, regression model.

MTA

See Mail Transfer Agent (MTA).

Multi-AZ deployment

A primary DB instance that has a synchronous standby replica in a different Availability Zone. The primary DB instance is synchronously replicated across Availability Zones to the standby replica.

multiclass classification model

A machine learning model that predicts values that belong to a limited, pre-defined set of permissible values. For example, "Is this product a book, movie, or clothing?"

multi-factor authentication (MFA)

An optional AWS account security feature. Once you enable AWS MFA, you must provide a six-digit, single-use code in addition to your sign-in credentials whenever you access secure AWS webpages or the AWS Management Console. You get this single-use code from an authentication device that you keep in your physical possession.

N

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namespace

An abstract container that provides context for the items (names, or technical terms, or words) it holds, and allows disambiguation of homonym items residing in different namespaces.

NAT

Network address translation. A strategy of mapping one or more IP addresses to another while data packets are in transit across a traffic routing device. This is commonly used to restrict Internet communication to private instances while allowing outgoing traffic.

NAT gateway

A NAT device, managed by AWS, that performs network address translation in a private subnet, to secure inbound Internet traffic. A NAT gateway uses both NAT and port address translation.

O

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object

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3): The fundamental entity type stored in Amazon S3. Objects consist of object data and metadata. The data portion is opaque to Amazon S3.

Amazon CloudFront: Any entity that can be served either over HTTP or a version of RTMP.

observation

Amazon Machine Learning: A single instance of data that Amazon Machine Learning (Amazon ML) uses to either train a machine learning model how to predict or to generate a prediction. Each row in an Amazon ML input data file is an observation.

On-Demand Instance

An Amazon EC2 pricing option that charges you for compute capacity by the hour with no long-term commitment.

operation

An API function. Also called an action.

optimistic locking

A strategy to ensure that an item that you want to update has not been modified by others before you perform the update. For Amazon DynamoDB, optimistic locking support is provided by the AWS SDKs.

origin access identity

Also called OAI. When using Amazon CloudFront to serve content with an Amazon S3 bucket as the origin, a virtual identity that you use to require users to access your content through CloudFront URLs instead of Amazon S3 URLs. Usually used with CloudFront private content.

origin server

The Amazon S3 bucket or custom origin containing the definitive original version of the content you deliver through CloudFront.

OSB transformation

Orthogonal sparse bigram transformation. In machine learning, a transformation that aids in text string analysis and that is an alternative to the n-gram transformation. OSB transformations are generated by sliding the window of size n words over the text, and outputting every pair of words that includes the first word in the window.

P

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pagination

The process of responding to an API request by returning a large list of records in small separate parts. Pagination can occur in the following situations:

The client sets the maximum number of returned records to a value below the total number of records.
The service has a default maximum number of returned records that is lower than the total number of records.

When an API response is paginated, the service sends a subset of the large list of records and a pagination token that indicates that more records are available. The client includes this pagination token in a subsequent API request, and the service responds with the next subset of records. This continues until the service responds with a subset of records and no pagination token, indicating that all records have been sent.

pagination token

A marker that indicates that an API response contains a subset of a larger list of records. The client can return this marker in a subsequent API request to retrieve the next subset of records until the service responds with a subset of records and no pagination token, indicating that all records have been sent.

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quartile binning transformation

Amazon Machine Learning: A process that takes two inputs, a numerical variable and a parameter called a bin number, and outputs a categorical variable. Quartile binning transformations discover non-linearity in a variable's distribution by enabling the machine learning model to learn separate importance values for parts of the numeric variable’s distribution.

Query

A type of HTTP-based request interface that generally uses only the GET or POST HTTP method and a query string with parameters.

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range GET

A request that specifies a byte range of data to get for a download. If an object is large, you can break up a download into smaller units by sending multiple range GET requests that each specify a different byte range to GET.

raw email

A type of sendmail request with which you can specify the email headers and MIME types.

RDS

See Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).

read replica

Amazon RDS: An active copy of another DB instance. Any updates to the data on the source DB instance are replicated to the read replica DB instance using the built-in replication feature of MySQL 5.1.

real-time predictions

Amazon Machine Learning: Synchronously generated predictions for individual data observations.

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S3

See Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

sampling period

A defined duration of time, such as one minute, over which Amazon CloudWatch computes a statistic.

sandbox

A testing location where you can test the functionality of your application without affecting production, incurring charges, or purchasing products.

Amazon SES: An environment that is designed for developers to test and evaluate the service. In the sandbox, you have full access to the Amazon SES API, but you can only send messages to verified email addresses and the mailbox simulator. To get out of the sandbox, you need to apply for production access. Accounts in the sandbox also have lower sending limits than production accounts.

scale in

To remove EC2 instances from an Auto Scaling group.

scale out

To add EC2 instances to an Auto Scaling group.

scaling policy

A description of how Auto Scaling should automatically scale an Auto Scaling group in response to changing demand.

scaling activity

A process that changes the size, configuration, or makeup of an Auto Scaling group by launching or terminating instances.

scheduler

The method used for placing tasks on container instances.

schema

Amazon Machine Learning: The information needed to interpret the input data for a machine learning model, including attribute names and their assigned data types, and the names of special attributes.

score cut-off value

Amazon Machine Learning: A binary classification models output a score that ranges from 0 to 1. To decide whether an observation should be classified as 1 or 0, you pick a classification threshold, or cut-off, and Amazon ML compares the score against it. Observations with scores higher than the cut-off are predicted as target equals 1, and scores lower than the cut-off are predicted as target equals 0.

search API

Amazon CloudSearch: The API that you use to submit search requests to a search domain.

search domain

Amazon CloudSearch: Encapsulates your searchable data and the search instances that handle your search requests. You typically set up a separate Amazon CloudSearch domain for each different collection of data that you want to search.

search domain configuration

Amazon CloudSearch: An domain's indexing options, analysis schemes, expressions, suggesters, access policies, and scaling and availability options.

search enabled

Amazon CloudSearch: An index field option that enables the field data to be searched.

search endpoint

Amazon CloudSearch: The URL that you connect to when sending search requests to a search domain. Each Amazon CloudSearch domain has a unique search endpoint that remains the same for the life of the domain.

search index

Amazon CloudSearch: A representation of your searchable data that facilitates fast and accurate data retrieval.

search instance

Amazon CloudSearch: A compute resource that indexes your data and processes search requests. An Amazon CloudSearch domain has one or more search instances, each with a finite amount of RAM and CPU resources. As your data volume grows, more search instances or larger search instances are deployed to contain your indexed data. When necessary, your index is automatically partitioned across multiple search instances. As your request volume or complexity increases, each search partition is automatically replicated to provide additional processing capacity.

search request

Amazon CloudSearch: A request that is sent to an Amazon CloudSearch domain's search endpoint to retrieve documents from the index that match particular search criteria.

search result

Amazon CloudSearch: A document that matches a search request. Also referred to as a search hit.

secret access key

A key that is used in conjunction with the access key ID to cryptographically sign programmatic AWS requests. Signing a request identifies the sender and prevents the request from being altered. You can generate secret access keys for your AWS account, individual IAM users, and temporary sessions.

security group

A named set of allowed inbound network connections for an instance. (Security groups in Amazon VPC also include support for outbound connections.) Each security group consists of a list of protocols, ports, and IP address ranges. A security group can apply to multiple instances, and multiple groups can regulate a single instance.

sender

The person or entity sending an email message.

Sender ID

A Microsoft-controlled version of SPF. An email authentication and anti-spoofing system. For more information about Sender ID, see Sender ID in Wikipedia.

sending limits

The sending quota and maximum send rate that are associated with every Amazon SES account.

sending quota

The maximum number of email messages that you can send using Amazon SES in a 24-hour period.

server-side encryption (SSE)

The encrypting of data at the server level. Amazon S3 supports three modes of server-side encryption: SSE-S3, in which Amazon S3 manages the keys; SSE-C, in which the customer manages the keys; and SSE-KMS, in which AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) manages keys.

service

See Amazon ECS service.

service endpoint

See endpoint.

service health dashboard

A web page showing up-to-the-minute information about AWS service availability. The dashboard is located at http://status.aws.amazon.com/.

service role

An IAM role that grants permissions to an AWS service so it can access AWS resources. The policies that you attach to the service role determine which AWS resources the service can access and what it can do with those resources.

SES

See Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES).

session

The period during which the temporary security credentials provided by AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) allow access to your AWS account.

SHA

Secure Hash Algorithm. SHA1 is an earlier version of the algorithm, which AWS has deprecated in favor of SHA256.

shard

Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES): A partition of data in an index. You can split an index into multiple shards, which can include primary shards (original shards) and replica shards (copies of the primary shards). Replica shards provide failover, which means that a replica shard is promoted to a primary shard if a cluster node that contains a primary shard fails. Replica shards also can handle requests.

shared AMI

An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that a developer builds and makes available for others to use.

shutdown action

Amazon EMR: A predefined bootstrap action that launches a script that executes a series of commands in parallel before terminating the job flow.

signature

Refers to a digital signature, which is a mathematical way to confirm the authenticity of a digital message. AWS uses signatures to authenticate the requests you send to our web services. For more information, to https://aws.amazon.com/security.

SIGNATURE file

AWS Import/Export: A file you copy to the root directory of your storage device. The file contains a job ID, manifest file, and a signature.

Signature Version 4

Protocol for authenticating inbound API requests to AWS services in all AWS regions.

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol

See SMTP.

Simple Storage Service

See Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

Single-AZ DB instance

A standard (non-Multi-AZ) DB instance that is deployed in one Availability Zone, without a standby replica in another Availability Zone.

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table

A collection of data. Similar to other database systems, DynamoDB stores data in tables.

tag

Metadata that you can define and assign to AWS resources, such as an EC2 instance. Not all AWS resources can be tagged.

tagging

Tagging resources: Applying a tag to an AWS resource.

Amazon SES: Also called labeling. A way to format return path email addresses so that you can specify a different return path for each recipient of a message. Tagging enables you to support VERP. For example, if Andrew manages a mailing list, he can use the return paths andrew+recipient1@example.net and andrew+recipient2@example.net so that he can determine which email bounced.

target attribute

Amazon Machine Learning (Amazon ML ): The attribute in the input data that contains the “correct” answers. Amazon ML uses the target attribute to learn how to make predictions on new data. For example, if you were building a model for predicting the sale price of a house, the target attribute would be “target sale price in USD.”

target revision

AWS CodeDeploy: The most recent version of the application revision that has been uploaded to the repository and will be deployed to the instances in a deployment group. In other words, the application revision currently targeted for deployment. This is also the revision that will be pulled for automatic deployments.

task

An instantiation of a task definition that is running on a container instance.

task definition

The blueprint for your task. Specifies the name of the task, revisions, container definitions, and volume information.

task node

An EC2 instance that runs Hadoop map and reduce tasks, but does not store data. Task nodes are managed by the master node, which assigns Hadoop tasks to nodes and monitors their status. While a job flow is running you can increase and decrease the number of task nodes. Because they don't store data and can be added and removed from a job flow, you can use task nodes to manage the EC2 instance capacity your job flow uses, increasing capacity to handle peak loads and decreasing it later.

Task nodes only run a TaskTracker Hadoop daemon.

tebibyte

A contraction of tera binary byte, a tebibyte is 2^40 or 1,099,511,627,776 bytes. A terabyte (TB) is 10^12 or 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. 1,024 TiB is a pebibyte.

template format version

The version of an AWS CloudFormation template design that determines the available features. If you omit the AWSTemplateFormatVersion section from your template, AWS CloudFormation assumes the most recent format version.

template validation

The process of confirming the use of JSON code in an AWS CloudFormation template. You can validate any AWS CloudFormation template using the cfn-validate-template command.

temporary security credentials

Authentication information that is provided by AWS STS when you call an STS API action. Includes an access key ID, a secret access key, a session token, and an expiration time.

throttling

The automatic restricting or slowing down of a process based on one or more limits. Examples: Amazon Kinesis Streams throttles operations if an application (or group of applications operating on the same stream) attempts to get data from a shard at a rate faster than the shard limit. Amazon API Gateway uses throttling to limit the steady-state request rates for a single account. Amazon SES uses throttling to reject attempts to send email that exceeds the sending limits.

time series data

Data provided as part of a metric. The time value is assumed to be when the value occurred. A metric is the fundamental concept for Amazon CloudWatch and represents a time-ordered set of data points. You publish metric data points into CloudWatch and later retrieve statistics about those data points as a time-series ordered data set.

time stamp

A date/time string in ISO 8601 format.

TLS

See Transport Layer Security.

tokenization

The process of splitting a stream of text into separate tokens on detectable boundaries such as whitespace and hyphens.

topic

A communication channel to send messages and subscribe to notifications. It provides an access point for publishers and subscribers to communicate with each other.

training datasource

A datasource that contains the data that Amazon Machine Learning uses to train the machine learning model to make predictions.

transition

AWS CodePipeline: The act of a revision in a pipeline continuing from one stage to the next in a workflow.

Transport Layer Security

A cryptographic protocol that provides security for communication over the Internet. Its predecessor is Secure Sockets Layer (SSL).

trust policy

An IAM policy that is an inherent part of an IAM role. The trust policy specifies which principals are allowed to use the role.

trusted signers

AWS accounts that the CloudFront distribution owner has given permission to create signed URLs for a distribution's content.

tuning

Selecting the number and type of AMIs to run a Hadoop job flow most efficiently.

tunnel

A route for transmission of private network traffic that uses the Internet to connect nodes in the private network. The tunnel uses encryption and secure protocols such as PPTP to prevent the traffic from being intercepted as it passes through public routing nodes.

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unbounded

The number of potential occurrences is not limited by a set number. This value is often used when defining a data type that is a list (for example, maxOccurs="unbounded"), in Web Services Description Language.

unit

Standard measurement for the values submitted to Amazon CloudWatch as metric data. Units include seconds, percent, bytes, bits, count, bytes/second, bits/second, count/second, and none.

unlink from VPC

The process of unlinking (or detaching) an EC2-Classic instance from a ClassicLink-enabled VPC.

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validation

See template validation.

value

Instances of attributes for an item, such as cells in a spreadsheet. An attribute might have multiple values.

Tagging resources: A specific tag label that acts as a descriptor within a tag category (key). For example, you might have EC2 instance with the tag key of Owner and the tag value of Jan. You can tag an AWS resource with up to 10 key–value pairs. Not all AWS resources can be tagged.

Variable Envelope Return Path

See VERP.

verification

The process of confirming that you own an email address or a domain so that you can send email from or to it.

VERP

Variable Envelope Return Path. A way in which email sending applications can match bounced email with the undeliverable address that caused the bounce by using a different return path for each recipient. VERP is typically used for mailing lists. With VERP, the recipient's email address is embedded in the address of the return path, which is where bounced email is returned. This makes it possible to automate the processing of bounced email without having to open the bounce messages, which may vary in content.

versioning

Every object in Amazon S3 has a key and a version ID. Objects with the same key, but different version IDs can be stored in the same bucket. Versioning is enabled at the bucket layer using PUT Bucket versioning.

virtualization

Allows multiple guest virtual machines (VM) to run on a host operating system. Guest VMs can run on one or more levels above the host hardware, depending on the type of virtualization.

virtual private cloud

See VPC.

virtual private gateway

See VPG.

visibility timeout

The period of time that a message is invisible to the rest of your application after an application component gets it from the queue. During the visibility timeout, the component that received the message usually processes it, and then deletes it from the queue. This prevents multiple components from processing the same message.

volume

A fixed amount of storage on an instance. You can share volume data between containers and persist the data on the container instance when the containers are no longer running.

VPC

Virtual private cloud. An elastic network populated by infrastructure, platform, and application services that share common security and interconnection.

VPC endpoint

A feature that enables you to create a private connection between your VPC and an another AWS service without requiring access over the Internet, through a NAT instance, a VPN connection, or AWS Direct Connect.

VPG

Virtual private gateway. The Amazon side of a VPN connection that maintains connectivity. The internal interfaces of the virtual private gateway connect to your VPC via the VPN attachment and the external interfaces connect to the VPN connection, which leads to the customer gateway.

VPN CloudHub

See AWS VPN CloudHub.

VPN connection

Amazon Web Services (AWS): The IPsec connection between a VPC and some other network, such as a corporate data center, home network, or co-location facility.

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WAM: See Amazon WorkSpaces Application Manager (Amazon WAM).
web access control list: AWS WAF: A set of rules that defines the conditions that AWS WAF searches for in web requests to AWS resources such as Amazon CloudFront distributions. A web access control list (web ACL) specifies whether to allow, block, or count the requests.
Web Services Description Language: A language used to describe the actions that a web service can perform, along with the syntax of action requests and responses. Your SOAP or other toolkit interprets a WSDL file to provide your application access to the actions provided by the web service. For most toolkits, your application calls a service action using routines and classes provided or generated by the toolkit.

X, Y, Z

X.509 certificate: An digital document that uses the X.509 public key infrastructure (PKI) standard to verify that a public key belongs to the entity described in the certificate.
yobibyte: A contraction of yotta binary byte, a yobibyte is 2^80 or 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 bytes. A yottabyte (YB) is 10^24 or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.
zebibyte: A contraction of zetta binary byte, a zebibyte is 2^70 or 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424 bytes. A zettabyte (ZB) is 10^21 or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. 1,024 ZiB is a yobibyte.
zone awareness: Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES): A configuration that distributes nodes in a cluster across two Availability Zones in the same region. Zone awareness helps to prevent data loss and minimizes downtime in the event of node and data center failure. If you enable zone awareness, you must have an even number of data instances in the instance count, and you also must use the Amazon Elasticsearch Service Configuration API to replicate your data for your Elasticsearch cluster.

Document Conventions

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