AMI: An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is an encrypted machine image stored in Amazon S3. It contains all the information necessary to boot instances of a customer’s software.
API: Application Programming Interface (API) is an interface in computer science that defines the ways by which an application program may request services from libraries and/or operating systems.
Authentication: Authentication is the process of determining whether someone or something is, in fact, who or what it is declared to be.
Availability Zone: 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.
Bucket: A container for objects stored in Amazon S3. Every object is contained within a bucket. For example, if the object named photos/puppy.jpg is stored in the johnsmith bucket, then it is addressable using the URL http://johnsmith.s3.amazonaws.com/photos/puppy.jpg.
CIDR Block: Classless Inter-Domain Routing Block of IP addresses.
EBS: Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides block level storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes are off-instance storage that persists independently from the life of an instance.
HMAC-SHA1: In cryptography, a keyed-Hash Message Authentication Code (HMAC or KHMAC), is a type of message authentication code (MAC) calculated using a specific algorithm involving a cryptographic hash function in combination with a secret key. As with any MAC, it may be used to simultaneously verify both the data integrity and the authenticity of a message. Any iterative cryptographic hash function, such as MD5 or SHA-1, may be used in the calculation of an HMAC; the resulting MAC algorithm is termed HMAC-MD5 or HMAC-SHA1 accordingly. The cryptographic strength of the HMAC depends upon the cryptographic strength of the underlying hash function, on the size and quality of the key and the size of the hash output length in bits.
Hypervisor: A hypervisor, also called Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM), is computer software/hardware platform virtualization software that allows multiple operating systems to run on a host computer concurrently.
AWS IAM: AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM) enables a customer to create multiple users and manage the permissions for each of these users within their AWS Account.
IP Address: An Internet Protocol (IP) address is a numerical label that is assigned to devices participating in a computer network utilizing the Internet Protocol for communication between its nodes.
IP Spoofing: Creation of Internet Protocol (IP) packets with a forged source IP address, called spoofing, with the purpose of concealing the identity of the sender or impersonating another computing system.
Object: The fundamental entities stored in Amazon S3. Objects consist of object data and metadata. The data portion is opaque to Amazon S3. The metadata is a set of name-value pairs that describe the object. These include some default metadata such as the date last modified and standard HTTP metadata such as Content-Type. The developer can also
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specify custom metadata at the time the Object is stored.
Paravirtualization: In computing, paravirtualization is a virtualization technique that presents a software interface to virtual machines that is similar but not identical to that of the underlying hardware.
Port Scanning: A port scan is a series of messages sent by someone attempting to break into a computer to learn which computer network services, each associated with a "well-known" port number, the computer provides.
Service: Software or computing ability provided across a network (e.g., EC2, S3).
Stateful firewall: In computing, a stateful firewall (any firewall that performs stateful packet inspection (SPI) or stateful inspection) is a firewall that keeps track of the state of network connections (such as TCP streams, UDP communication) traveling across it.
Virtual Instance: Once an AMI has been launched, the resulting running system is referred to as an instance. All instances based on the same AMI start out identical and any information on them is lost when the instances are terminated or fail.
X.509: In cryptography, X.509 is an ITU-T standard for a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) for Single Sign-On (SSO) and Privilege Management Infrastructure (PMI). X.509 specifies, amongst other things, standard formats for public key certificates, certificate revocation lists, attribute certificates, and a certification path validation algorithm.
