Glossary

An alphanumeric token that uniquely identifies a request sender. This ID is associated with your Secret Access Key.

The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that enables you to launch and manage server instances in Amazon's data centers using APIs or available tools and utilities.

An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is an encrypted machine image stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). It contains all the information necessary to boot instances of your software.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) offers a reliable, highly scalable, hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between computers.

Amazon EC2 locations are composed of Regions and Availability Zones. Availability Zones are distinct locations that are engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones and provide inexpensive, low latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same Region.

Auto Scaling key term. A capacity group is a representation of a distributed application running on multiple Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances that are to be automatically scaled. Please see the detailed information on this term in the Automatic Scaling Service Developer Guide.

Amazon CloudWatch key term. Please see the detailed information on this term, located at key term Dimension.

After an AMI is launched in the cloud, the resulting running system is called an instance or EC2 instance. By default, you can run up to 20 EC2 instances. All instances based on the same AMI start out identical and any information on them is lost when the instances are terminated or fail.

Elastic Load Balancing key term. An LoadBalancer is represented by a DNS name and provides the single destination to which all requests intended for your application should be directed. Please see the detailed information on this term in the Load Balancing Service Developer Guide.

Amazon CloudWatch key term. Please see the detailed information on this term, located at key term Measure.

Amazon CloudWatch key term. Please see the detailed information on this term, located at key term Metric.

Amazon EC2 locations are composed of Regions and Availability Zones. Regions are geographically dispersed and will be in separate geographic areas or countries. Regions consist of one or more Availability Zones.

Auto Scaling key term. A scaling activity is a long-running process that represents a change to your capacity group. Please see the detailed information on this term in the Automatic Scaling Service Developer Guide.

A key assigned to you by Amazon Web Services (AWS) when you sign up for an AWS account. Used for request authentication.

Amazon CloudWatch key term. Please see the detailed information on this term, located at key term Statistic.

Auto Scaling key term. A trigger defines the metrics and user-defined thresholds based on those metrics to be used in the automatic scaling of capacity groups. Please see the detailed information on this term in the Automatic Scaling Service Developer Guide.

Term used in Web Service Definition Language (WSDL), i.e. maxOccurs="unbounded", meaning that the number of potential occurences is not limited by a set number. Very often used when defining a data type that is a list of other types, such as an unbounded list of integers (element members) or an unbounded list of other complex types that are element/members of the list being defined.

Amazon CloudWatch key term. Please see the detailed information on this term, including standard and CustomUnits, located at key term Unit.