Bastion host(s) are a useful and important component of a system management infrastructure. A bastion-host, in this context, is actually more properly, but more obscurely, called a jump server. In this post I will simply use the term bastion host. It is the most commonly used term for the system's function: a server, which has undergone security hardening steps, that is the operational and administrative control point for systems and hosts in a datacenter (or AWS Region).