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

With Amazon CloudWatch, an action is an Amazon SNS topic on Auto Scaling policy that is invoked when an alarm detects a threshold change.

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. For more information, go to the Auto Scaling Developer Guide.

Amazon CloudWatch key term. Basic statistics are those derived from a 5-minute granularity.

Amazon CloudWatch key term. Detailed statistics are those derived from a 1-minute granularity.

Amazon CloudWatch key term. A dimension contains additional information about a metric. Dimensions are structured as key-value pairs.

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. A LoadBalancer is represented by a DNS name and provides the single destination to which all requests intended for your application should be directed. For more information, go to the Elastic Load Balancing Developer Guide.

Amazon CloudWatch key term. An element of time-series data, specific to a namespace, and having one or more dimensions. CloudWatch metrics are the basis for CloudWatch statistics.

Amazon CloudWatch key term. A namespace is a conceptual element to which you attach one or more metrics.

Amazon CloudWatch key term. Statistics are sampled over a period you specify, such as 60 seconds. Alarms invoke actions when a state has changed for a number of consecutive periods.

Auto Scaling policy. You can configure a CloudWatch alarm to invoke an Auto Scaling policy.

A geographical area in which you can launch instances (e.g., US, EU).

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 Auto Scaling 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 the section called “Statistics”.

Amazon CloudWatch key term. Data provided to CloudWatch as part of a metric. The time value is assumed to be when the value occurred.

Auto Scaling key term. A trigger is a concept that combines two AWS features: a CloudWatch alarm (configured to watch a specified CloudWatch metric) and an Auto Scaling policy that describes what should happen when the alarm threshold is crossed. For more information, go to the Auto Scaling Developer Guide.

Term used in Web Service Definition Language (WSDL), i.e. maxOccurs="unbounded", meaning that the number of potential occurrences 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. CloudWatch units include Seconds, Percent, Bytes, Bits, Count, Bytes/Second, Bits/Second, Count/Second, and None. For a complete list, go to the MetricDatum data type in the Amazon CloudWatch API Reference.