Cloud Computing Glossary

A managed service that acts as a single entry point for API calls, handling request routing, authentication, rate limiting, and monitoring for backend microservices or serverless functions.

The automatic adjustment of computing resources in response to real-time demand, adding instances when load increases and removing them when demand drops to optimize performance and cost.

An isolated data center within a cloud region, with independent power, cooling, and networking, designed to protect applications from single points of failure.

A physical server dedicated to a single tenant without a hypervisor layer, providing maximum performance and hardware-level control for workloads that cannot tolerate virtualization overhead.

A distributed network of proxy servers and data centers that delivers web content to users based on geographic proximity, reducing latency and improving page load speeds.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment—a set of automated practices where code changes are built, tested, and deployed to production frequently and reliably through automated pipelines.

A lightweight, standalone executable package that includes application code and all its dependencies, sharing the host OS kernel and running consistently across different computing environments.

A cultural and technical practice that unifies software development and IT operations, emphasizing automation, continuous delivery, monitoring, and collaboration to accelerate the software release cycle.

An open-source platform for building, shipping, and running applications inside containers, providing tools to package applications with their dependencies into portable, reproducible images.

The ability of a cloud system to dynamically acquire and release resources to match current demand precisely, scaling out during peaks and scaling in during lulls to minimize costs.

A system design approach that ensures a specified level of operational uptime by eliminating single points of failure through redundancy, failover mechanisms, and geographic distribution.

Adding more machines or instances to a system to distribute workload, as opposed to vertical scaling which increases the power of existing machines. Preferred in cloud environments for flexibility.

Software that creates and manages virtual machines by abstracting physical hardware resources and allocating them to multiple isolated virtual environments running on the same host.

An open-source container orchestration platform that automates deploying, scaling, and managing containerized applications across clusters, providing self-healing, service discovery, and rolling updates.

The time delay between a user's request and the system's response, measured in milliseconds. In cloud computing, latency is affected by geographic distance, network congestion, and processing time.

A service that distributes incoming network traffic across multiple backend servers or instances to ensure even resource utilization, maximize throughput, and prevent any single server from becoming a bottleneck.

An architectural pattern where an application is composed of small, independent services that communicate via APIs, each responsible for a specific business capability and independently deployable.

A strategy of using cloud services from multiple providers simultaneously to avoid vendor lock-in, leverage best-of-breed services, and enhance resilience and geographic reach.

A storage architecture that manages data as discrete objects with metadata and unique identifiers, highly scalable and ideal for unstructured data such as images, videos, logs, and backups.

A pricing model where customers are charged based on actual resource consumption rather than upfront commitments, converting capital expenditures into variable operating expenses.

A geographic area containing one or more data centers (availability zones) where cloud resources can be provisioned. Regions enable data residency compliance and low-latency access for local users.

A cloud execution model where the provider manages all infrastructure and dynamically allocates resources per function invocation, billing only for actual execution time with no idle capacity costs.

An open-source Infrastructure as Code tool by HashiCorp that enables users to define, provision, and manage cloud infrastructure across multiple providers using declarative configuration files.

A situation where a customer becomes dependent on a specific cloud provider's proprietary services and tools, making migration to another provider costly and technically challenging.

A logically isolated virtual network within a public cloud where users can control IP addressing, subnets, routing, and security groups, providing network-level isolation for cloud resources.