Cloud lexicon

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The following list provides an explanation of some of the more common computing terms you may come across or need to employ in your own writing.

Data hardware

End-user applications

Commercial offers

  • Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Part of Amazon Web Services (AWS), EC2 provides scalable computing capacity in the cloud, which developers can use to deploy scalable applications.
  • Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). Part of AWS, S3 allows for the storage and retrieval of data. It can also be used to host static websites.
  • Amazon Web Services (AWS). A huge suite of *aaS provided by Amazon; many services highly elastic; availability regions distributed globally; largest public cloud provider by far.
  • AWS. The organizational unit of Amazon that provides a variety of cloud services. AWS operates from 11 physical locations across North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
  • Azure. Microsoft's public cloud computing platform. Provides services such as computing, storage, analytics, and networking.
  • Google App Engine. A service that enables developers to create and run web applications on Google's infrastructure and share their applications via a pay-as-you-go, consumption-based plan with no setup costs or recurring fees.
  • Google Apps. Google's Software as a Service (SaaS) product includes an office productivity suite, email, calendar, and file storage and sharing. Google Apps for Business includes an enterprise administration interface and archiving tools, and support for legal holds document discovery compliance. Google Apps for Education includes additional collaboration and reporting tools for classroom environments.
  • Kubernetes. An open-source container cluster management platform maintained by Google.
  • Lambda (serverless architecture). AWS cloud service that enables the building of we apps and mobile backends in a faster, more agile way.
  • Microsoft Azure. Microsoft's cloud platform that provides a myriad of Platform as a Service (PaaS) and IaaS offerings, including Microsoft-specific and third-party standards, for developers to deploy cloud applications and services.
  • Microsoft Office 365. Microsoft's software plus services model that offers Microsoft Office on a subscription-based pricing model, with cloud storage abilities. For business and enterprise use, Office 365 includes email and SNS, with cloud-hosted instances of Exchange Server and Skype for Business, among others.
  • Salesforce. An online SaaS company that is best known for delivering customer relationship management (CRM) software to companies over the internet.

Essential characteristics

  • Customer self-service. A feature that allows customers to provision, manage, and terminate services themselves, without involving the service provider, via a web interface or programmatic calls to service APIs.

Service models

  • Software as a Service (SaaS). Cloud application services, whereby applications are delivered over the internet by the provider so the applications don't have to be purchased, installed, and run on the customer's computers. SaaS providers were previously referred to as application service providers.
  • PaaS. Cloud platform services, whereby the computing platform (operating system and associated services) is delivered as a service over the internet by the provider.
  • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Cloud infrastructure services in which a virtualized environment is delivered as a service by the cloud provider. This infrastructure can include servers, network equipment, and software, including a complete desktop environment such as Windows or Linux.
  • Functions(-as-a-Service). Cloud services that enable app serverless app management and development. Common FaaS providers include AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions.
  • Hardware as a Service (HaaS).
  • Software plus services. The combination of cloud-hosted services with locally running software. This method allows for using the local system for processing power while relying on cloud operations for software license verification, portable identities, syncing between devices, and file storage.
  • Hosted application. An internet-based or web-based application software program that runs on a remote server and can be accessed via an internet-connected PC or thin client. See also SaaS.

Deployment models

  • Private cloud. Dedicated to a single organization and delivers scalability and self-service through proprietary architecture.
  • Private cloud. Services offered over the internet or over a private internal network to select users. These services are not available to the general public.
  • Public cloud. Based on the standard cloud computing model where a service provider makes applications, storage, and other resources available to the general public via the internet.
  • Public cloud. Services offered over the public internet. These services are available to anyone who wants to purchase the service.
  • Consumer cloud. Cloud computing offerings targeted toward individuals for personal use, such as Dropbox or iCloud.
  • Virtual private cloud (VPC). A private cloud that exists within a shared or public cloud, e.g., the Amazon VPC that allows Amazon EC2 to connect to legacy infrastructure on an IPsec VPN.
  • Hybrid cloud. An environment that uses a combination of on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud services.
  • Hybrid cloud. The combination of a public cloud provider (such as AWS) with a private cloud platform. The public and private cloud infrastructures operate independently of each other, and integrate using software and processes that allow for the portability of data and applications.
  • Colocation. A data center that provides rental space, network connections, power, cooling, and security for servers that you manage and maintain.
  • External cloud. Public or private cloud services that are provided by a third party outside the organization.
  • Internal cloud. A private cloud instance provided and supported by an IT department for internal use.

Market players

  • Cloud broker. (Like any other broker) abstracts away from provider details to offer users easier access to cloud computing resources; often provides simplified API and/or human UI, data lifecycle management, and focused service integrations and aggregations.
  • Cloud provider. A company that provides cloud-based platform, infrastructure, application, or storage services to other organizations and/or individuals, usually for a fee.
  • Service provider. The company or organization that provides a public or private cloud service.

Pricing models

  • Advertising-based pricing model. A pricing model whereby services are offered to customers at low or no cost, with the service provider being compensated by advertisers whose ads are delivered to the consumer along with the service.
  • Consumption-based pricing model. A pricing model whereby the service provider charges its customers based on the amount of the service the customer consumes, rather than a time-based fee. For example, a cloud storage provider might charge per gigabyte of information stored. See also Subscription-based pricing model.
  • Pay as you go. A cost model for cloud services that encompasses both subscription-based and consumption-based models, in contrast to the traditional IT cost model that requires up-front capital expenditures for hardware and software.
  • Subscription-based pricing model. A pricing model that lets customers pay a fee to use the service for a particular time period, often used for SaaS services. See also Consumption-based pricing model.
  • Utility computing. A provisioning model in which services are available as needed, and users are charged for specific usage, in a manner similar to municipal utilities such as electricity or water.
  • Vendor lock-in. Dependency upon a particular cloud vendor and low ability to migrate between vendors due to an absence of support for standardized protocols, APIs, data structures (schema), and/or service models.
  • Vendor lock-in. Where customers are dependent on a single cloud provider technology implementation and cannot easily move in the future to a different vendor without substantial costs, legal constraints, or technical incompatibilities.

Open-source software

  • Apache Hadoop. An open-source software framework for distributed storage and processing of large sets of data.
  • Docker. An open source platform aimed to deploy and manage virtualized containers.
  • Docker. Open-source software that automates the deployment of applications inside virtualized software containers.
  • Jenkins. open source automation server with plugins to support building, deploying, and automating any project.
  • OpenStack. A free and open-source cloud computing software platform used to control pools of processing, storage, and networking resources in a datacenter.

New terms

  • Apache thrift. An interface definition language and binary communication protocol.
  • API. Application Programming Interface, an endpoint exposed in a programming language that offers some useful feature or behavior.
  • Auto-scaling. Helps ensure that you have the correct number of Amazon EC2 instances available to handle the load for your application.
  • BASE (basic availability, soft state, eventual consistency). An approach to storage that divides physical or virtual storage medium into independently addressable chunks ('blocks'); increases performance by narrowing search space (specified as a path) for a particular store or retrieve operation; often accessed via logical abstraction layer that adds metadata (filesystem, DBMS).
  • CAP theorem. The idea that a distributed system can only provide two out of three benefits: consistency, availability, and partition tolerance.
  • Centralized logging solution. Either a custom managed Elasticsearch-Logstash-Kibana (ELK) stack or a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution. Having a centralized logging solution enables programmers or admins to easily view, compare, and correlate logs from different servers at the same place.
  • Circuit breaker. A cloud-native design pattern to build and operate resilient, scalable microservices.
  • Cloud architecture. The components that are required for cloud computing including a front-end platform, a back-end platform, a cloud-based delivery, and a network.
  • Cloud computing. Ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand access to shared computing resources; offers on-demand self-service (without human interaction), broad network access, resource pooling (dynamically assigned as workloads vary), location independence (to varying degrees), rapid elasticity, metered service (charging only for resources used); generally offered at three fundamental service levels (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS); deployed for use within an organization (private cloud), for any organization or individual (public cloud), or some combination (hybrid cloud).
  • Cloud migration. The process of moving applications and data from an onsite computer to the cloud. It can also include moving data from one cloud environment to another.
  • Cloud portability. The ability to move applications and data from one cloud provider to another. See also Vendor lock-in.
  • Cloud storage. A service that allows customers to save data by transferring it over the internet or another network to an offsite storage system maintained by a third party.
  • Cloud. A metaphor for a global network, first used in reference to the telephone network and now commonly used to represent the internet.
  • Cloud-native application. An application that can take full advantage of a cloud environment (e.g. scalability, high availability).
  • Cloud-native middleware. Middleware framework or product that natively leverages cloud-native concepts, design patterns, and cloud platforms.
  • Cloudsourcing. Replacing traditional IT operations with lower-cost, outsourced cloud services.
  • Cloudware. Software that enables creating, deploying, running, or managing applications in the cloud.
  • Cluster. A group of linked computers that work together as if they were a single computer, for high availability and/or load balancing.
  • Container image. A container image is essentially a snapshot of a container. They are created with a build command and produce a container that you can later run.
  • Container. Resource isolation at the OS (rather than machine) level, usually (in UNIX-based systems) in the user space. Isolated elements vary by containerization strategy and often include file system, disk quota, CPU and memory, I/O rate, root privileges, and network access. Much lighter-weight than machine-level virtualization and sufficient for many isolation requirement sets.
  • Content delivery network (CDN). Physically distributed servers that provide (often static) content along paths optimized per user; decrease transport time and overall network load; simplify per-machine resource management; prevent DoS by distributing (and thereby absorbing) requests.
  • Content delivery network (CDN). A distributed system consisting of servers in discrete physical locations, configured in a way that clients can access the server closest to them on the network, thereby improving speeds.
  • Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS). An open standard for controlling content and document management systems and repositories using web protocols.
  • Data volume. A marked directory inside of a container that exists to hold persistent or commonly shared data.
  • Disruptive technology. A business term that describes innovations that improve products or services in unexpected ways. These innovations change the methods used to accomplish a task, and re-shape the market for that task. Cloud computing is considered a disruptive technology because of its elasticity, flexible pricing models, and maintenance cost compared to traditional IT service provisioning.
  • Distributed system. Any number of computer systems linked by a network.
  • Dockerfile. A file that contains one or more instructions that dictate how a container is to be created.
  • Dynamic or agile environment. An environment where servers are frequently scaled up or down.
  • Elastic computing. The ability to dynamically provision and deprovision computing and storage resources to stretch to the demands of peak usage, without the need to worry about capacity planning and engineering around uneven usage patterns.
  • Elastic ephemeral computing. Ephemeral storage and computing via instance store volumes available on EC2.
  • Event-driven architecture. A pattern promoting the production and consumption of events used to integrate different parts of a system.
  • Host-based intrusion detection system (HIDS). A software application that monitors and analyzes a computer system for any unauthorized activity.
  • Lift and shift. Common cloud migration option that replicates in-house apps in the cloud without re-design.
  • Managed DNS. An external service provider that runs authoritative DNS servers on your behalf, answering queries about your domain names.
  • Mesosphere. A commercial container cluster management platform based on Apache Mesos.
  • Metered licensing. Per-use licensing flexibility in the cloud.
  • Microservices architecture. Describes applications built as collection of single-process services communicating over constrained and easily managed channels (often HTTP), where each service does one well-defined business level task or set of tasks and scales independently of other services. Microservice component boundaries map onto bounded contexts in Domain-Driven Design. The aim is to make changes easier, deployment faster, technology<->business match tighter, infrastructure more automated, conceptual and data models more flexible, and applications more resilient to failure.
  • Microservices. A pattern based on service-oriented architectures used to build cloud-native and independently deployable systems.
  • Middleware. Software that sits between applications and operating systems, consisting of a set of services that enable interoperability in support of distributed architectures by passing data between applications. So, for example, the data in one database can be accessed through another database.
  • Multitenancy. The existence of multiple clients sharing resources (services or applications) on distinct physical hardware. Due to the on-demand nature of cloud, most services are multi tenant.
  • On-demand service. A model by which a customer can purchase cloud services as needed; for instance, if customers need to utilize additional servers for the duration of a project, they can do so and then drop back to the previous level after the project is completed.
  • Orchestration. The process of managing how containers are created and how they are connected.
  • Origin server. Application servers that serve content to a CDN when an object is no longer cached or has expired.
  • Private container registry. A private and secure location to publish, store, and retrieve container images for software you use in your infrastructure.
  • Protocol buffers. Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data, similar to a smaller, faster, and simpler XML.
  • Scalability. The ability for the cloud to continue to function well when the usage and storage has grown.
  • Scale elastically. Delivering capacity on demand and then eliminating when it is no longer needed.
  • Semantic versioning. A governance scheme for how to structure a version number and when to adjust it.
  • Serverless. A platform providing computing, networking, and storage without the need of managing (virtual) machines.
  • Service discovery. A cloud-native design pattern to discover distributed microservices in a flexible architecture.
  • Service level agreement (SLA). A contractual agreement by which a service provider defines the level of service, responsibilities, priorities, and guarantees regarding availability, performance, and other aspects of the service.
  • Service migration. The act of moving from one cloud service or vendor to another.
  • Social networking service (SNS). Used in enterprises for collaboration, file sharing, and knowledge transfer; among the most common platforms are Microsoft's Yammer, and Salesforce's Chatter. Often called enterprise social software to differentiate between "traditional" SNS platforms such as Facebook or LinkedIn.
  • Vertical cloud. A cloud computing environment optimized for use and built around the compliance needs of specialized industries, such as healthcare, financial services, and government operations.
  • Virtual private data center. Resources grouped according to specific business objectives.
  • Web API. An HTTP endpoint designed to accept and return data, rather than HTML.
  • WebSocket. A computer communications protocol, providing full-duplex communication channels over a single TCP connection.
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