Cloud Terminology

Resilience and Performance

1. High Availability

The ability to keep services up and running for long periods of time, while experiencing little to no downtime.

2. Scalability

The ability to increase or decrease resources for a given workload. We can add resources to service a workload (scale out), or add additional capabilities to handle increases in demand (scale up).

3. Elasticity

The ability to automatically or dynamically increase or decrease resources as necessary.

4. Agility

The ability to react quickly. Cloud services can allocate and deallocate resources quickly.

5. Fault Tolerance

The ability to remain up & running even if a component or service is no longer functioning.

6. Disaster Recovery

The ability to recover from a cloud service outage. Cloud services disaster recovery should happen quickly through automation.

Scaling

1. Vertical Scaling

Increasing the capacity of a single server by adding more resources (CPU, RAM, storage).

2. Horizontal Scaling

Adding more servers to a system to handle increased load, distributing the workload across multiple machines.

Costing

1. Predictive Cost

The ability to predict what costs will be incurred for a particular cloud service or offering.

2. Economies of Scale

Cost advantages that enterprises obtain due to the scale of operation, with cost per unit of output decreasing with increasing scale.

3. Capital Expenditure (CapEx)

Funds used by an organization to acquire, upgrade, and maintain physical assets such as property, industrial buildings, or equipment.

4. Operational Expenditure (OpEx)

Ongoing costs for running a product, business, or system, including expenses such as rent, utilities, and salaries.

Security and Compliance

1. Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Controls and manages user identities and permissions within the cloud environment.

2. Encryption

Securing data in transit and at rest using encryption algorithms.

3. Compliance

Adherence to legal and regulatory requirements (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA) in cloud operations.

Networking and Connectivity

1. Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

Virtual network dedicated to an organization within a public cloud infrastructure.

2. Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Distributed network of servers that delivers content efficiently to users based on their geographic location.

Data Management

1. Data Backup

Copies of data stored separately to ensure data recovery in case of data loss.

2. Data Replication

Creating redundant copies of data across multiple locations or servers for high availability.

Monitoring and Management

1. Cloud Monitoring

Continuous tracking and analysis of cloud resources and applications to ensure performance and availability.

Development and Deployment

1. DevOps

Culture and set of practices that combine software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to shorten the systems development life cycle.

2. Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)

Practices to automate the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes.