Step by Step: Highly Available, Scalable & Secure AWS Stack

A virtual private network carries traffic through an encrypted tunnel over a public network so that a remote device or site behaves as though it were connected to a private one.

An intrusion detection system watches network traffic or host activity for signs of attack and raises alerts, while an intrusion prevention system sits inline and can block what it recognises.

A SIEM collects logs and events from across an organisation's systems into one searchable store, correlates them into alerts, and retains them for investigation and compliance.

A wireless LAN connects devices to a network over radio using the 802.11 family of standards, through access points that bridge the wireless medium onto the wired network and enforce the authentication and encryption that the shared airwaves demand.

TCP/IP is the family of protocols on which the internet runs: IP moves packets between addresses without guarantees, and TCP or UDP ride on top to deliver either a reliable ordered stream or fast unordered messages.

The OSI model is a seven-layer reference framework that separates networking into physical transmission, link, network, transport, session, presentation and application concerns, used to reason about where a problem sits rather than to describe any real protocol stack.

A container is an application packaged together with the libraries and configuration it needs, run as an isolated process on a host that is already switched on, so the same package behaves the same way on a laptop, in a build pipeline and in production.

Object storage keeps every file as a self-contained object (the bytes, a unique key and some metadata) inside a flat bucket you read and write over HTTP, with no drive to mount and no directory tree underneath it.

Load balancing is the practice of putting one entry point in front of several interchangeable servers and distributing incoming requests among them by a chosen policy, so that no single machine carries the traffic and no single machine's failure takes the service down.