Cloud Computing Glossary
Your comprehensive guide to cloud infrastructure, DevOps, and platform engineering terminology.
22 terms shown
A
Availability Zone
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.
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C
Cloud Metering
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.
Cost ManagementInfrastructureRead definitionCloud Region
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.
InfrastructureRead definitionCommand Line Interface (CLI)
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.
InfrastructureRead definitionControl Plane
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.
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D
Disaster Recovery
Disaster Recovery (DR) is the strategy, processes, and procedures for restoring cloud services and data after a major failure, outage, or catastrophic event.
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F
Flavors
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.
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G
Gnocchi
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.
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H
Heat
Heat is the OpenStack orchestration service that automates the deployment and management of cloud infrastructure using declarative templates.
InfrastructureRead definitionHigh Availability
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.
InfrastructureRead definitionHorizon Dashboard
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.
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I
Infrastructure as Code
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.
InfrastructureRead definitionInfrastructure Health
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.
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M
Monitoring
Monitoring is the practice of continuously observing cloud infrastructure to track performance metrics, detect issues, and maintain service availability through dashboards, alerts, and thresholds.
InfrastructureRead definitionMulti-Tenancy
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.
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O
OpenStack API
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.
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P
Planned Maintenance
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.
InfrastructureRead definitionProject
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.
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S
Service Level Agreement
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.
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T
Terraform
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).
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U
Usage and Quotas
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.
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V
Volume
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.
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