Jump Box

ELI5 — The Vibe Check

Jump box is just another name for a bastion host — a server you 'jump' through to reach private resources. You SSH into the jump box from the internet, then SSH from the jump box to your private servers. It's the cloud equivalent of an airlock — two doors, never both open at the same time. Oldschool but still widely used.

Real Talk

A jump box (also called bastion host) is an intermediary server providing controlled access to servers in a private network. It's positioned in a public subnet with restricted inbound SSH/RDP access. Modern cloud-native alternatives include AWS SSM Session Manager, GCP IAP TCP Forwarding, and Azure Bastion, which provide browser-based access without managing the jump box instance.

When You'll Hear This

"Use the jump box to access the production database servers." / "We're migrating from jump boxes to IAP tunneling — no more instance to maintain."