Glossary
Your comprehensive guide to cloud infrastructure, DevOps, and platform engineering terminology.
Access and Security refers to the set of controls and mechanisms that determine who can access your cloud resources and what actions they can perform through authentication, authorization, and network access controls.
An API credential is authentication information that identifies and authorizes a user or application to access cloud services programmatically through an API.
An application credential is a scoped authentication token in OpenStack that allows applications to authenticate to cloud APIs without exposing user passwords.
Autoscaling automatically adjusts compute resources in response to real-time demand, adding capacity during traffic spikes and removing it when demand drops.
An availability zone is a physically separate datacenter location within a cloud region that has independent power, cooling, and network connections to protect your workloads from localized failures.
A backup is a recoverable copy of data stored separately from the original source, used to restore files, volumes, or entire systems after data loss, corruption, or accidental deletion.
Block Storage provides persistent, disk-like storage that can be attached to cloud instances, allowing data to survive instance restarts and be moved between instances.
Cinder is the OpenStack block storage service that creates, manages, and attaches persistent storage volumes to instances.
Cloud billing is the process of tracking, calculating, and invoicing resource usage in a cloud environment, translating metered consumption of compute, storage, and network resources into charges based on the provider's pricing model.
Cloud metering is the automated measurement and recording of how much of each cloud resource you consume over time, tracking metrics such as compute hours, storage capacity, and network bandwidth.
Cloud networking is the infrastructure and services that connect cloud resources, enabling communication between instances, storage, and the internet through virtual networks, subnets, routers, and security groups.
A cloud region is a geographic area containing one or more data centers where cloud resources are deployed, providing location-specific performance, data residency compliance, and disaster recovery capabilities.
CloudKitty is an OpenStack rating service that collects cloud resource usage metrics, applies pricing rules to that data, and produces cost information for chargeback and showback reporting.
A Command Line Interface (CLI) is a text-based tool that allows users to interact with cloud services by typing commands instead of clicking through a graphical interface.
Compute is the processing power and resources used to run applications and workloads in a cloud environment, consisting of CPU cycles, memory, and other resources that execute code and handle data.
A control plane is the management layer that orchestrates cloud services by handling API requests, authentication, scheduling, and coordination between components while remaining separate from the data plane where actual workloads run.
Disaster Recovery (DR) is the strategy, processes, and procedures for restoring cloud services and data after a major failure, outage, or catastrophic event.
FinOps is a cloud financial management discipline that combines financial accountability, operational efficiency, and cross-team collaboration to optimize cloud spending.
A firewall rule is a configuration statement that permits or denies network traffic based on specific criteria, specifying which connections are allowed based on protocol, port, and IP address.
A flavor is a predefined template that specifies the vCPUs, RAM, and disk space allocated to an instance when you launch it in a cloud environment.
A floating IP is a static public IP address that you can assign to and move between instances in a cloud environment, allowing external network access that persists across instance changes.
Glance is the OpenStack image service that stores, catalogs, and retrieves disk images used to launch instances in a cloud environment.
Gnocchi is a time-series database for OpenStack that aggregates metrics during ingestion rather than at query time, providing fast retrieval of pre-computed monitoring and telemetry data.
Heat is the OpenStack orchestration service that automates the deployment and management of cloud infrastructure using declarative templates.
High Availability is a system design approach that keeps services accessible with minimal downtime by eliminating single points of failure through redundant components and automatic failover mechanisms.
Horizon Dashboard is the web-based graphical interface for OpenStack that allows users and administrators to manage cloud resources through a browser instead of command-line tools.
A hypervisor is software that creates and manages virtual machines by allowing multiple operating systems to share a single physical server's hardware resources.
Identity management is the system for creating, managing, and authenticating user identities and controlling their access to cloud resources through roles, groups, and permissions.
An image is a template file that contains a pre-configured operating system, software, and settings used to create instances in cloud hosting. It acts as a blueprint that determines what your virtual machine will run when it starts.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the practice of managing and provisioning cloud infrastructure through machine-readable configuration files rather than manual processes or interactive tools.
Infrastructure Health refers to the overall operational status of cloud infrastructure components, indicating whether compute, storage, network, and management services are functioning normally, experiencing degraded performance, or offline.
An instance is a virtual machine running on a cloud provider's infrastructure with its own operating system, CPU, memory, and storage that you can create, configure, and manage on demand.
Instance lifecycle refers to the sequence of states and transitions a virtual machine goes through from the moment it is created until it is permanently deleted, including active, stopped, paused, suspended, shelved, and error states.
Keystone is the OpenStack identity service that provides authentication, authorization, and service discovery for all OpenStack components and users.
A load balancer is a network device or service that distributes incoming traffic across multiple servers or instances, providing a single entry point for your application while preventing any single server from becoming overwhelmed.
Monitoring is the practice of continuously observing cloud infrastructure to track performance metrics, detect issues, and maintain service availability through dashboards, alerts, and thresholds.
Multi-tenancy is a cloud architecture where multiple customers share the same physical infrastructure while remaining logically isolated from each other, enabling efficient resource utilization and cost sharing.
Network isolation is the practice of separating resources into distinct network segments that cannot communicate with each other unless you explicitly configure connections.
A network in cloud hosting is an isolated virtual network segment where you can place and connect cloud resources using private IP addresses. It controls how instances communicate with each other and external networks.
Neutron is the OpenStack networking service that provides network connectivity for instances by managing networks, subnets, routers, floating IPs, security groups, and load balancers through a flexible plugin architecture.
Nova is the OpenStack compute service that manages the lifecycle of virtual machine instances, including creation, scheduling, and termination across a cluster of compute nodes.
Object storage is a data storage architecture that manages data as discrete objects containing the data itself, metadata, and a unique identifier, accessed via HTTP APIs rather than file paths or block addresses.
The OpenStack API is a collection of RESTful HTTP interfaces that allow applications and tools to programmatically manage cloud resources including instances, networks, storage, and identity services.
Planned maintenance refers to scheduled periods when cloud providers perform infrastructure updates, security patches, or hardware replacements, typically announced in advance to allow customers to prepare their workloads.
A private network is an isolated network segment within your cloud project that creates a dedicated communication path between instances using private IP addresses not exposed to the public internet.
A project is an isolated resource container in OpenStack that groups users, instances, networks, storage, and other cloud resources under a single administrative boundary with defined quotas and access controls.
The project selector is a dropdown menu in the OpenStack Horizon dashboard that allows users to switch between different projects (tenants) they have permission to access.
A quota is a limit that restricts how many resources a cloud project can create or consume, preventing any single project from exhausting shared infrastructure capacity.
A role is a predefined set of permissions that determines what actions a user or group can perform on cloud resources within a project.
Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is a security model that restricts system access based on predefined roles assigned to users, where each role contains a specific set of permissions that determine what actions a user can perform.
A router connects separate networks and directs traffic between them using routing rules and tables.
A security group is a set of firewall rules that controls which network traffic can reach or leave your cloud resources. It permits or denies connections based on protocol, port, and IP address.
A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a contractual commitment between a cloud provider and customer that guarantees specific service availability, typically expressed as an uptime percentage such as 99.9% or 99.99%, with remedies like service credits if the provider fails to meet those commitments.
A snapshot is a point-in-time copy of a volume or instance state that captures all data as it existed at the moment of creation, enabling backup, recovery, and cloning operations.
An SSH key pair is a set of two cryptographic files (a public key and a private key) used to authenticate your identity when connecting to remote servers without typing a password.
A subnet is a logical subdivision of an IP network within a cloud environment that partitions a larger network into smaller, manageable segments for grouping and isolating resources.
Swift is the OpenStack object storage service that stores and retrieves unstructured data such as files, images, backups, and media using HTTP APIs.
Terraform is an open-source Infrastructure as Code tool by HashiCorp that provisions and manages cloud resources using declarative configuration files written in HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL).
Usage and quotas are resource limits set by cloud administrators that control how much compute, storage, and network capacity an account or project can consume.
Usage-based billing is a pricing model where customers pay only for the cloud resources they actually consume rather than a fixed monthly fee.
A user is an individual account that can authenticate with a cloud platform and interact with resources based on assigned roles and project memberships.
A Virtual Machine (VM) is a software-based computer that runs on physical hardware through a hypervisor, providing an isolated computing environment with its own operating system, CPU allocation, memory, and storage.
A Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is an isolated network environment within a public cloud provider where you control IP addressing, subnets, routing tables, and security rules for your cloud resources.
A volume is a block storage device that provides persistent data storage for instances in cloud hosting. It functions like an external hard drive that can be attached to, detached from, and moved between instances while retaining all stored data.
A VPN (Virtual Private Network) is an encrypted network connection that creates a secure tunnel between endpoints over the public internet, protecting data in transit and allowing private resources to communicate as if on the same local network.
Learn more
Our documentation and support articles provide in-depth guides on using InMotion Cloud. Reach out if you need help with any terminology or concepts.