AWS Terminology

The following are the definitions for the terms used in this guide:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the Amazon Cloud Computing service. For details, see AWS.

• Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is an AWS service that enables you to launch and manage server instances in Amazon's data centers using APIs or available tools and utilities. The AWS EC2 website is available at: Amazon EC2.

• Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) lets you provision a logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud where you can launch AWS resources in a virtual network defined by you. For details, see Amazon Virtual Private Cloud.

• CentOS is a community-supported, free and open source operating system based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

• A Load Balancer serves as the single point of contact for between your client and the cloud, distributing incoming application traffic across multiple targets, in multiple Availability Zones.

• Availability zones are regions, physical locations around the world where AWS data centers are located.

• An Application Load Balancer (ALB) is used for Multi ZONE (3 zone) deployments and is not applicable for the Single ZONE deployments in our Cloud Formation Templates. For details, see Getting started with Application Load Balancers.

• Elastic Network Interface (ENI) is a virtual network interface that you can attach to an instance in a VPC. Network interfaces are available only for instances running in a VPC. For details, see Elastic network interfaces .

• AWS Lambda lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You pay only for the compute time you consume; there is no charge when your code is not running. For details, see AWS Lambda.

• Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is an encrypted machine image that contains all information necessary to boot instances of software. Instances of MarkLogic Server are created from the stock Amazon Linux and Linux 2 AMI and have been pre-installed with MarkLogic and the necessary dependencies.

  Type	Pricing
  Enterprise	Per-hour AWS premium charged
  Bring Your Own License (BYOL)	No additional charge

• Elastic Block Store (EBS) is a type of storage designed specifically for Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS allows you to create volumes that can be mounted as devices by Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes behave like raw unformatted external block devices. They are attached to user-specified block devices and provide a block device interface. You can load a file system on top of Amazon EBS volumes, or use them just as you would use a block device. Amazon EBS volumes exist separately from the actual instances and persist until you delete them. This allows you to store your data without leaving an Amazon EC2 instance running. Each Amazon EBS volume can be up to 16 TiB in size.

• An Instance is the running system after an AMI is launched. Instances remain running unless they fail or are terminated. When this happens, the data on the instance is no longer available. Once launched, an instance looks very much like a traditional host.

• An Instance Type defines the size of an Amazon EC2 instance. The MarkLogic Server instance types are shown in the table at the end of Step 5 in Creating a CloudFormation Stack Using the AWS Console.

• An Instance Store (sometimes referred to as Ephemeral Storage) is a fixed amount of storage space for an instance. An instance store is not designed to be a permanent storage solution. If an instance reboots, either intentionally or unintentionally, the data on the instance store will survive. If the underlying drive fails or the instance is terminated, the data will be lost.

• AWS Cloud Storage (S3) is an Amazon web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. For details, see Configuring MarkLogic for Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon S3.

• Cloud Formation (CF) is the AWS Cloud Formation service for provisioning startup of AWS resources. For details, see Deploying MarkLogic on EC2 Using CloudFormation and AWS CloudFormation Documentation. The MarkLogic CloudFormation templates are available from MarkLogic on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

• A Classic Load Balancer (CLB) runs at the application layer (layer seven) and the transport layer (layer 4) in the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model. The CloudFormation template will create a CLB if you deploy to one zone.

• Application Load Balancer (ALB) is type of load balancer used in Elastic Load Balancing. It runs at the application layer (layer seven in the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model). The load balancer receives a request, evaluates the listener rules in priority order, determines which rule to apply, and selects a target from the target group.

  Note: With an ALB, you will be unable to use an ODBC connection for use with business intelligence (BI) tools. To use an ODBC connection with BI tools, you can create a separate Network Load Balancer for ODBC connections

• Auto Scaling Groups (ASG) are used with a load balancer and target groups, enabling you to scale out instances, or scale back in and de-register instances. For more information, see Attach an Elastic Load Balancing load balancer to your Auto Scaling group .

• Target groups route requests to one or more registered targets using specified protocol and port numbers. A target may be registered with multiple target groups.

• Listeners check for connection requests from clients, using the configured protocol and port. The rules defined for a listener determine how the load balancer routes requests to its registered targets.

• Key Management Service (KMS) is a an AWS service that provides secure location, known as a keystore, where the encryption keys used to encrypt data are stored. This AWS KMS is not to be confused with the internal MarkLogic KMS described in Overview of MarkLogic Server on AWS in Secure MarkLogic Server. The AWS KMS can be used as an external KMS. To access AWS KMS, MarkLogic must be configured to use AWS Credentials, as described in Configure AWS Credentials. A MarkLogic cluster inside a VPC (with or without a public DNS) will work with AWS KMS. For details on AWS KMS, see AWS Key Management Service

• Managed Clusters is a MarkLogic feature that works with AWS features to automatically create and provision the necessary AWS resources and provide MarkLogic with the information needed to manage your cluster. For details, see The Managed Cluster Feature.

• MarketPlace is the AWS service for publishing pay-per-use and free (no extra charge) public AMI's on amazon. For details, see aws marketplace.

• An EC2 Compute Unit (ECU) provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor.

• Metadata Database is the database that stores and indexes all of the * configuration data required to manage a cluster of one or more MarkLogic Servers. For AWS, the DynamoDB service is used to implement the Metadata Database. For details, see Getting started with DynamoDB.