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

Auto Scaling might suspend processes for Auto Scaling groups that repeatedly fail to launch instances. Auto Scaling groups that most commonly experience administrative suspension have zero running instances, have been trying to launch instances for more than 24 hours, and have not succeeded in that time in launching any instances.

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 representation of an application running on multiple Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. For more information, see Auto Scaling Group.

Auto Scaling term describing the condition in which a user-set threshold (upper or lower boundary) is passed. If the duration of the breach is determined to be significant, set by a breach duration parameter, then the trigger fires and possibly performs a scaling activity.

Auto Scaling term. A period of time after a trigger is fired during which no other trigger activity can take place. A cooldown period allows the effect of a scaling activity to become visible in the metrics that originally triggered the activity. This period is configurable, and gives the system time to perform and adjust to any new scaling activities (such as scale-in and scale-out) that affect capacity.

Amazon CloudWatch key term. A dimension is part of the unigue identifier of a metric. It specifies how CloudWatch aggregates data. For more information, go to the Amazon CloudWatch Developer Guide.

A virtual computer running in the cloud. EC2 instances are launched from an Amazon Machine Image (AMI).

Auto Scaling key term. The parameters used to create new EC2 instances.

Auto Scaling term that refers to the life cycle state of the EC2 instances contained in an Auto Scaling group. EC2 instances progress through several states over their lifespan; these include Pending, InService, Terminating and Terminated.

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. A metric is an aggregation of values from selected measures stored in one-minute time slots. For more information, go to the Amazon CloudWatch Developer Guide.

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

Auto Scaling key term. A process that changes the size of an Auto Scaling group. For more information, see Scaling Activity.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) key used for request authentication.

Amazon CloudWatch key term. A statistic is a time-series of values for a metric. For more information, go to the Amazon CloudWatch Developer Guide.

Auto Scaling key term. The mechanism used to initiate Auto Scaling activities.

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. 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. Every measure that is received by the CloudWatch Service has a unit attached, such as seconds or bytes. For more information,go to the Amazon CloudWatch Developer Guide.