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Software Engineering vocabulary · APIs, Networking and Security

Security group

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

nounCommon term

In software engineering, security group means: A virtual firewall in the cloud with rules that say which network traffic, by port and source, may reach or leave a server or other resource.

In Turkish: güvenlik grubu, sanal güvenlik duvarı

How it is used

The name comes from AWS; Azure has network security groups (NSGs) and Google Cloud uses firewall rules. Engineers open or close ports with inbound and outbound rules. 'Open to 0.0.0.0/0' means open to the whole internet.

Example sentences

  1. The security group only allows traffic on port 443 from the load balancer.

  2. I can't connect to the instance; I think the security group is blocking SSH.

Common collocations

  • security group rule
  • inbound rule
  • open a port
  • network security group
  • VPCShort for virtual private cloud: your own isolated private network inside a public cloud, where you control IP ranges, subnets, routing and access.
  • subnetA smaller range of IP addresses inside a larger network such as a VPC, used to group resources and control which of them can reach the internet.
  • IAMShort for identity and access management: the system that controls who or what can sign in to a cloud account and what they are allowed to do there.
  • least privilegeThe security principle that every user, service or program should get only the permissions it really needs for its job, and nothing more.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: APIs, Networking and Security

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