Glossary | AWS Production Deployment Guide

Glossary

AWS production glossary

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Plain-language definitions for common production architecture terms.

An isolated location inside an AWS Region. Production systems usually spread critical paths across multiple AZs.

A geographic AWS area containing multiple Availability Zones. Choose based on latency, compliance, and service availability.

A private network boundary for AWS resources, subnets, routing, security groups, and controlled connectivity.

A stateful virtual firewall attached to resources such as EC2, ALB, and RDS.

An identity that grants temporary permissions to AWS services or users without static credentials.

A deployment pattern that keeps service capacity across more than one Availability Zone for resilience.

A database recovery feature that restores data to a previous moment inside a retention window.

A queue that stores failed messages so teams can inspect and safely replay or discard them.

A release strategy that shifts traffic from one environment version to another with rollback control.

A release pattern that sends a small percentage of traffic to a new version before full rollout.

Recovery Time Objective: how quickly the service must be restored after an incident.

Recovery Point Objective: how much data loss is acceptable after an incident.

A security principle where identities receive only the permissions required to do their job.

Web Application Firewall, used to filter malicious or abusive HTTP traffic at the edge or load balancer.

Dead-letter queue, used for failed async messages and operational investigation.

Design property where retrying an operation does not create duplicate or incorrect side effects.