AWS Terms & Definitions Reviewer

Flashcards covering core terminology and concepts for AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), DevOps concepts and developer tools, and Amazon CloudWatch monitoring.

SYSTEM ADMIN MAINTENANCE FINAL EXAM

A web service that enables AWS customers to manage users and user permissions in AWS.

Group (IAM)

An entity that can contain many users; a user can belong to multiple groups. Groups cannot be nested and can contain only users.

Role (IAM)

An entity that has a set of permissions that differ from users or groups.

Resource (IAM)

An entity in AWS that typically has a friendly name (such as example_bucket) and an Amazon Resource Name (ARN) which uses a standardized format and uniquely identifies it.

Policy (IAM)

A document that provides a formal statement of one or more permissions.

AWS IAM Unique ID (or principal ID)

A permanent, 21-character immutable identifier automatically assigned by AWS to every identity resource like users, roles, and groups, starting with a 4-character type prefix (such as AIDA for users or AROA for roles).

AWS Security Token Service (STS)

A service whose API and custom code can be used by an application to prompt the user to provide an MFA code and serial number.

IAM ARN format

arn:aws:service:region:account:resource (where service is always iam, region is always left blank, and account is the AWS account ID with no hyphens).

MFA-protected API policies

Policies that include a condition statement (or statements) with the aws:MultiFactorAuthAge key.

Amazon VPC

A service that provides a logically isolated area of the AWS cloud where you can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define, closely resembling a traditional network operated in a data center.

Subnet

A range of IP addresses in your VPC.

Route Table

A table containing a set of rules, called routes, that are used to determine where network traffic is directed.

Internet Gateway

A horizontally scaled VPC component that allows communication between instances in your VPC and the internet.

VPC Endpoint

A virtual device enabling private connections between your VPC and supported AWS services or VPC endpoint services powered by PrivateLink without requiring an internet gateway, NAT device, VPN connection, or AWS Direct Connect connection.

VPC Peering

A networking connection that allows you to connect one VPC with another VPC through a direct network route using private IP addresses.

NAT Gateway

A highly available gateway added to a VPC to give instances in a private subnet access to the internet to initiate connections and receive responses, while preventing inbound connections initiated from the internet.

VPC FlowLog

A feature of AWS that captures information about the IP traffic going to or from the network interfaces in a VPC, which can be stored in Amazon CloudWatch Logs or an Amazon S3 bucket.

VPC NACL (Network Access Control List)

An optional security layer for your VPC that controls traffic in and out of one or more subnets.

Unmatched NACL rule

A rule in a Network ACL whose rule number is an asterisk (*), which determines that traffic not matching any numbered rules is denied; it cannot be modified or removed.

Custom Network ACL

A user-defined Network ACL that, by default, denies all inbound and outbound traffic until rules are added.

Devops

The integration of Developers and Operation teams to improve collaboration and productivity by automating Infrastructure, automating workflow, and continuously measuring application performance.

Monolithic Architecture

An architecture featuring a single code base for the entire application developed in one programming language, tightly coupled with interdependent components, and updated by schedule.

Microservice Architecture

An architecture where each microservice has its own code, can be developed in different programming languages, consists of loosely coupled, self-sufficient services, and is delivered continuously.

Two pizza teams

A team organization structure used to decompose monolithic applications for agility into microservices, designed for full ownership by the Ops team and full accountability by the Dev team.

AWS CodePipeline

A developer tool that orchestrates deployment models to production using AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS CodeDeploy.

AWS CodeCommit

A source control service that uses standard Git tools, provides scalability, availability, and durability via Amazon S3, and supports encryption at rest with customer-specific keys.

AWS CodeDeploy

A service that provides easy and reliable deployments, scales with ease, and deploys to any servers.

Continuous Integration

A practice where multiple users work simultaneously on different features of the same application, merging code changes back to the repository more frequently where they are validated by automated building and testing.

AWS CloudFormation

An automated Infrastructure as a Service (IAS) tool that creates templates to describe and model AWS infrastructure, provisioning AWS resources based on dependency needs.

Elastic Beanstalk

An easy-to-use PaaS service for deploying and scaling web applications and services developed with Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker on familiar servers such as Apache, Nginx, Passenger, and IIS.

AWS OpsWorks

An integrated application management solution for ops-minded developers and IT admins to model, control, and automate applications of any scale using Chef recipes.

CHEF

An automation platform that provides a way to transform infrastructure into code, comprising Chef Server, Node, and Workstation components.

AWS X-Ray

A service for analyzing and debugging applications, pinpointing and understanding root cause analysis (RCA), errors, and bottlenecks, including performance analysis for AWS Lambda functions.

Amazon CloudWatch

An AWS component that provides cloud-based real-time monitoring of AWS resources and applications from a centralized dashboard.

CloudWatch Metrics

Variables measured for your resources and applications that are specific to an AWS region, cannot be deleted, expire after 15 months of no new data points, and are defined by a unique name/namespace/dimension combination.

CloudWatch Alarms

Alarms that watch metrics and send notifications or automatically make changes to monitored resources when a specified threshold is breached.

Contributor Insights

A CloudWatch feature that provides metrics to analyze log data, create time series, and glean insights.

CloudWatch Synthetics

A service that allows you to monitor your APIs and endpoints using canaries.

ServiceLens

A feature that integrates with AWS X-Ray to provide better visibility of your applications and services.

Container Insights

A feature that enables you to collect and analyze data from your containerized applications and services.

Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS)

A service that coordinates and manages the delivery of messages to subscribing endpoints or clients, used with CloudWatch to send messages when an alarm threshold is reached.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

A service that enables automatic launching or terminating of Amazon EC2 instances based on user-defined policies, health status checks, and schedules, often triggered by CloudWatch alarms.