gistfile1.txt

A

Application: also stack
A collection of services which provides a unified set of functions to an end user, possibly in the form of an API or a User Interface.

Availability:
A measure of the uptime percentage which includes downtime for any reason, including faults and planned maintenance.

Availability Zone: also AZ
A collection of network resources, hosts and the services they provide which share no infrastructure with other availability zones. The purpose of an AZ is to be a fundamental unit upon which resilient services can be built. A failure in and of one Availability Zone should never impact another Availability Zone. Should probably be called a Failure Zone given that it attempts to encapsulate failure inside of it.

B

C

Compute Node: also Type-2 Hypervisor
A physical computer which runs a full operating system to execute and manage virtual instances or containers.

D

Daemon: also server, worker
A program that is not invoked explicitly, but lies dormant waiting for some condition(s) to occur. The idea is that the perpetrator of the condition need not be aware that a daemon is lurking (though often a program will commit an action only because it knows that it will implicitly invoke a daemon). A network daemon listens for requests sent to it on a network interface.

E

Environment:

Eventual Consistency:
An informal promise that, if no new updates are made to a given data item, eventually all accesses to that item will return the last updated value.

F

Fully Qualified Domain Name: also FQDN
The full name of a host, consisting of its local hostname and its domain name, including a top-level domain (tld).

G

H

I

Idempotent:
An idempotent operation is one that has no additional effect if it is called more than once with the same input parameters.

J

K

L

M

N

Node: also host
A computer, computing instance, virtual instance, or container which is connected to a network.

O

P

Platform: also framework
A hardware and/or software environment which offers a consistent interface to a set of computing resources.

Q

R

Region:
A collection of Availability Zones located in a single geographic area.

Reliability:
The ability of a system or component to function under stated conditions for a specified period of time or amount of usage. In the context of past performance, it is a measure of the uptime percentage which only includes downtime due to faults. See also: Availability.

Resilience:
The ability of a system to adapt or recover from stress or faults in order to avoid systemic failure.

S

Service:
One or more network daemons running on one or more hosts and providing a functional application or API. Services are often systems composed of multiple layers of services with complex dependencies upon each other.

Service name: also API endpoint
A name provided to a service used to identify it. A service's fully-qualified domain name must be unique.

System:
A system is a set of interacting or interdependent components forming an integrated whole. Systems are structured by their internal components, may transform external inputs to external outputs, and are bounded by the environment in which they reside.

Systems Engineer:
You.

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z