Cloud Glossary

Browse 124 cloud terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

124 Cloud Terms

Amazon Web Services
A major cloud platform offering infrastructure and managed services for computing, storage, networking, data, and more. In tech culture, the full name often...
Apache
Apache typically refers to the Apache HTTP Server, the world's most influential open-source web server. First released in 1995 and maintained by the Apache...
Apache Beam
Apache Beam is an infrastructure or backend concept used to run, host, or observe applications. It is commonly used for production services and operational...
Apache Cassandra
Apache Cassandra is an infrastructure or backend concept used to run, host, or observe applications. It is commonly used for production services and...
Apache Flink
Apache Flink is an infrastructure or backend concept used to run, host, or observe applications. It is commonly used for production services and operational...
Apache Hadoop
Apache Hadoop is an infrastructure or backend concept used to run, host, or observe applications. It is commonly used for production services and operational...
Apache Hive
Apache Hive is an infrastructure or backend concept used to run, host, or observe applications. It is commonly used for production services and operational...
Apache Pulsar
Apache Pulsar is an infrastructure or backend concept used to run, host, or observe applications. It is commonly used for production services and operational...
Apache Spark
Apache Spark is an infrastructure or backend concept used to run, host, or observe applications. It is commonly used for production services and operational...
Apache Zookeeper
Apache Zookeeper is an infrastructure or backend concept used to run, host, or observe applications. It is commonly used for production services and...
Application Server
Application Server is an infrastructure or backend concept used to run, host, or observe applications. It is commonly used for production services and...
As a Service
A delivery model where a capability is provided on-demand as a managed service rather than as software or infrastructure the customer runs themselves. The...
Auto-scaling
The automatic adjustment of compute resources — adding or removing server instances, containers, or function invocations — in response to real-time demand...
Auto-scaling Group
Auto-scaling Group (ASG) is a cloud infrastructure feature that automatically adjusts the number of compute instances (virtual machines or containers) in a...
Availability Zone
A physically separate data center within a cloud region, with independent power, cooling, and networking. Deploying across multiple AZs provides high...
AWS CDK
AWS CDK is Amazon's Cloud Development Kit for defining AWS infrastructure in code. It is commonly used for repeatable cloud provisioning with high-level...
AWS Certification
A certification earned by passing Amazon Web Services exams covering cloud concepts, architecture, operations, security, or specialty domains. In tech culture...
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda is a serverless compute platform that runs short-lived functions on demand. It is commonly used for event-driven APIs, automation, and background...
Azure
Microsoft's cloud platform, offering infrastructure, managed services, identity, and enterprise integrations. In culture, Azure is often discussed alongside...
Azure Functions
Azure Functions is Microsoft's serverless platform for running event-driven code. It is commonly used for scheduled jobs, HTTP handlers, and cloud...
Block Storage
A storage type that splits data into fixed-size blocks and stores them with unique addresses, mimicking a physical hard drive. Provides low-latency random...
Bucket
A grouping container used to hold related items, often in hash tables, cloud object storage, or rate-limiting logic. The exact meaning depends on context, but...
Client-Server
Client-Server is a build or developer-tooling concept used to compile, package, transform, or automate code. It is commonly used for repeatable engineering...
Cloud API
An API exposed by a cloud platform to manage resources such as compute, storage, networking, identity, or monitoring. Cloud APIs are the main interface for...
Cloud Architecture
The design of how an application or platform uses cloud services, including compute models, networking, storage, identity, scaling, and operational boundaries....
Cloud Availability Region
A geographically distinct cloud area where providers offer isolated but connected infrastructure capacity, typically with separate failure domains from other...
Cloud Build
A build process or service that runs in cloud infrastructure rather than on local machines or self-hosted build servers. Cloud builds offer elastic capacity...
Cloud Burst
A sudden spike or surge in cloud resource usage, traffic, or spending that appears abruptly. In ops slang, cloud burst can refer either to elastic scaling...
Cloud CDN
A content delivery network service provided as part of a cloud platform to cache and serve content from edge locations closer to users. Cloud CDNs are commonly...
Cloud Certification
A certification related to cloud platforms, architecture, security, or operations, often earned through vendor exams and structured study. In culture, cloud...
Cloud CLI
A command-line interface provided by a cloud platform to manage resources, inspect state, and automate operational tasks. Cloud CLIs are heavily used in...
Cloud Config
Configuration that controls how cloud resources, services, or workloads are provisioned and behave, often expressed through files, templates, or platform...
Cloud Console
The web-based management interface provided by a cloud platform for viewing, configuring, and operating cloud resources. Cloud consoles are useful for ad hoc...
Cloud Container
A containerized workload running in a cloud-managed environment, often on orchestration platforms or serverless container services. Cloud containers package...
Cloud Cost
The money spent on cloud infrastructure and managed services, often discussed in relation to efficiency, surprise bills, and scaling habits. In startup and ops...
Cloud Database
A database service hosted and operated in the cloud, often provided as a managed offering with backups, replication, scaling, and maintenance handled by the...
Cloud Deploy
A deployment workflow or platform capability that pushes application changes into cloud infrastructure and services. Cloud deploy systems often coordinate...
Cloud Deployment
The act of releasing an application, service, or infrastructure change into a cloud environment. Cloud deployments may involve containers, serverless...
Cloud Event
An event emitted by a cloud service to signal that something meaningful has happened, such as a file upload, instance change, message arrival, or deployment...
Cloud Formation
A declarative infrastructure provisioning approach associated with defining cloud resources in templates so environments can be created, updated, and versioned...
Cloud Foundry
An open-source platform-as-a-service for deploying and operating applications with managed infrastructure concerns.
Cloud Function
Cloud Function is an infrastructure or backend concept used to run, host, or observe applications. It is commonly used for production services and operational...
Cloud Gateway
A gateway component in a cloud environment that routes, secures, or transforms traffic between clients, services, or external networks and cloud-hosted...
Cloud HSM
A cloud-hosted hardware security module service that stores and uses cryptographic keys inside dedicated tamper-resistant hardware under provider-managed...
Cloud Infrastructure
The compute, storage, networking, identity, and platform services that form the operational foundation of a system running in the cloud. Cloud infrastructure...
Cloud Logging
The collection, storage, querying, and routing of logs through cloud-native logging services and pipelines. Cloud logging often combines infrastructure,...
Cloud Messaging
Managed cloud services and patterns for sending messages, events, or notifications between systems asynchronously. Cloud messaging is used for task queues,...
Cloud Migration
The process of moving applications, data, and operational workflows from on-premises or other hosting models into cloud infrastructure and services. Cloud...
Cloud Migration Culture
The set of attitudes, habits, and organizational assumptions surrounding moves from on-premises systems to cloud platforms. The phrase captures that cloud...
Cloud Monitoring
The observation of cloud resources, services, and workloads through metrics, logs, traces, and health signals provided by cloud-native or integrated monitoring...
Cloud Native
Cloud Native is an infrastructure or backend concept used to run, host, or observe applications. It is commonly used for production services and operational...
Cloud Networking
The design and operation of network connectivity inside and around cloud environments, including virtual networks, subnets, routing, load balancers, gateways,...
Cloud Platform
A cloud provider or internal platform offering compute, storage, managed services, deployment tooling, and operational primitives for building and running...
Cloud Provider
Cloud Provider is an infrastructure or backend concept used to run, host, or observe applications. It is commonly used for production services and operational...
Cloud Queue
A managed queue service in the cloud used to buffer tasks, events, or messages between producers and consumers. Cloud queues simplify asynchronous...
Cloud Repatriation
The practice of moving workloads from public cloud platforms back to private infrastructure, colocation, or on-premises systems. In tech culture cloud...
Cloud Resource
A provisioned unit of cloud infrastructure or service such as a VM, bucket, load balancer, function, queue, or database instance. Cloud resources are usually...
Cloud Run
Cloud Run is Google Cloud's managed platform for deploying stateless containers. It is commonly used for HTTP services and background workloads without...
Cloud SDK
A software development kit that provides language-specific libraries and helpers for interacting with a cloud provider's APIs. Cloud SDKs handle...
Cloud Security
The protection of cloud-hosted data, workloads, identities, networks, and control planes through architecture, policy, monitoring, and operational controls. It...
Cloud Service
A capability delivered by a cloud platform, such as compute, storage, messaging, database hosting, identity, or monitoring, that developers can consume on...
Cloud Storage
Data storage provided by a cloud platform, including object, block, and file storage services that can scale independently of local hardware. Cloud storage...
Cloud Tax
A slang term for the extra cost paid for convenience, managed services, abstraction, or vendor markup in cloud environments compared with self-managed...
Cloud Vendor
A company that provides cloud infrastructure or managed services. In practice, cloud vendor discussions often involve lock-in, pricing, support quality, region...
Cloud VPN
A VPN connection or managed service used to link cloud networks with other environments such as offices, datacenters, or user devices. Cloud VPNs are commonly...
Cloud Washing
Marketing or messaging that repaints an ordinary product as 'cloud' to sound more modern without meaningful technical change. In tech slang, cloud washing...
Cold Start
The latency penalty when a serverless function or container must be initialized from scratch — loading the runtime, dependencies, and application code before...
Compute Engine
A service or subsystem responsible for executing workloads, often at the VM, container, or job-processing level. The phrase is often used for cloud compute...
Compute Instance
An individual virtual or physical runtime unit provisioned to execute workloads, such as a VM or managed machine in a cloud platform. Compute instances are the...
Confidential Computing
Hardware-based technology that protects data during processing by performing computation in a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). Even the cloud provider's...
Coreweave
A cloud infrastructure company known for GPU-heavy compute used in AI training and inference workloads.
data gravity
The principle that large datasets attract applications, services, and additional data to their location, much like physical mass attracts objects through...
Data Lake Security
The controls used to protect large centralized repositories of raw structured and unstructured data. Data lake security is difficult because these platforms...
Data Residency
The requirement or policy that certain data be stored and sometimes processed within a particular geographic region or legal jurisdiction. Data residency...
Egress
Data transferred out of a cloud provider's network to the internet or another region. Cloud providers typically charge for egress but not ingress, making it...
Elastic Beanstalk
An Elastic Beanstalk is a development concept used to shape how software is built, executed, or maintained in real systems. Developers rely on it to make code...
Elastic Search
An Elastic Search is a development concept used to shape how software is built, executed, or maintained in real systems. Developers rely on it to make code...
Firecracker
An open-source virtualization technology for lightweight microVMs designed for secure and efficient serverless or multi-tenant workloads.
Google Cloud Run
A Google Cloud Run is a development concept used to shape how software is built, executed, or maintained in real systems. Developers rely on it to make code...
Horizontal Scaling
Adding more machines to a system to handle increased load, distributing work across a fleet. The opposite of vertical scaling (making one machine bigger)....
Hyperscaler
A cloud or infrastructure provider operating data centers and platforms at enormous global scale, typically with highly automated provisioning and massive...
IaaS
Infrastructure as a Service — a cloud computing model where virtualized computing resources (servers, storage, networking) are provided on demand over the...
IAM
Identity and Access Management — a framework for managing digital identities and their permissions. In cloud platforms, IAM controls who (users, services,...
immutable infrastructure
An infrastructure management approach where servers are never modified after deployment — any change requires building a new server image and replacing the old...
infrastructure as code
The practice of managing and provisioning infrastructure (servers, networks, databases) through machine-readable definition files rather than manual processes...
Kubernetes (K8s)
The numeronym for Kubernetes: K + 8 letters + s. The tech industry loves numeronyms — i18n (internationalization), l10n (localization), a11y (accessibility)....
Lambda Function
In cloud computing, a serverless compute unit (named after AWS Lambda) that runs code in response to events — such as HTTP requests, queue messages, or file...
Launch Configuration
A template that defines the instance parameters — AMI, instance type, key pair, security groups, and user data — used by an auto scaling group to launch new...
Lift and Shift
Moving a system from one environment to another with minimal redesign, usually trading speed for deeper modernization. In engineering slang, lift-and-shift...
Multicloud
Describing a strategy or environment that intentionally uses services from more than one cloud provider, such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. Teams pursue...
Multi-Tenancy Security
The controls and architecture used to keep different customers, business units, or tenants isolated from one another while sharing the same application or...
Multi-Tenant SaaS
A software architecture where many customers share the same core application environment and infrastructure while their data and permissions remain logically...
Neon
A serverless PostgreSQL platform that separates storage and compute, enabling features impossible with traditional PostgreSQL deployments. Neon's architecture...
Object Storage
A storage architecture that manages data as discrete objects (each with data, metadata, and a unique ID) rather than as files in a hierarchy or blocks on a...
Open Infrastructure
Infrastructure software, standards, and ecosystems built with open-source or openly governed models rather than closed proprietary control. In systems culture,...
OpenStack
A large open source platform for building and managing private or public cloud infrastructure, including compute, networking, storage, and identity services....
PaaS
Platform as a Service — a cloud computing model that provides a managed environment for developing, running, and managing applications without dealing with the...
PaaS Bro
A mocking label for someone who aggressively promotes platform-as-a-service solutions with more enthusiasm than nuance, often glossing over constraints,...
Pinecone
A managed vector database service purpose-built for machine learning applications that need to search over high-dimensional embedding vectors at scale....
Pizza as a Service Model
A humorous explanatory model that compares layers of service responsibility to pizza-making, often used to explain SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS tradeoffs.
Pulumi
An infrastructure-as-code platform that lets teams define cloud resources using general-purpose programming languages.
Region
A geographic area containing multiple availability zones where cloud resources can be deployed. Choosing regions affects latency (closer to users = faster),...
Replicate
A platform for running open-source machine learning models in the cloud via a simple API. Replicate lets developers run models without managing infrastructure:...
SaaS
Software as a Service — a distribution model where software is hosted centrally and accessed via subscription, rather than installed locally. You don't buy the...
Scale Out
Horizontal scaling — increasing system capacity by adding more machines or instances rather than upgrading existing ones. Stateless services scale out...
Scale Up
Vertical scaling — increasing system capacity by upgrading the hardware resources (CPU, RAM, disk, network) of an existing machine or instance. Simpler than...
Serverless
Serverless is a cloud computing model where the provider dynamically manages server allocation, scaling, and infrastructure, so developers deploy only their...
Serverless Slang
A loose or promotional use of 'serverless' to describe systems where infrastructure feels less visible, even though servers still exist underneath. It often...
Server Side Public License
A license designed to require service providers to release the code for the broader service stack if they offer the licensed software as a service.
Service Account
A non-human identity used by applications, services, or automation to authenticate and interact with APIs and cloud resources. Unlike user accounts, service...
Spinnaker
A multi-cloud continuous-delivery platform used to manage deployment pipelines and release strategies.
Spin Up
To create, start, or bring something online quickly, such as a server, environment, process, or team effort. The phrase implies rapid activation rather than...
Spot Instance
Spare cloud compute capacity sold at steep discounts (up to 90% off on-demand pricing) with the caveat that instances can be reclaimed with short notice...
Terraform
Terraform is an open-source infrastructure-as-code tool created by HashiCorp that lets you define, provision, and manage cloud resources using declarative...
Terraform Provider
A plugin that teaches Terraform how to manage resources on a specific platform — such as AWS, GCP, Azure, or Datadog — by implementing CRUD operations that...
The Cloud Is Just Someone Else's Computer
A skeptical phrase reminding people that cloud services still run on physical hardware owned and operated by another party, with all the trust and dependency...
Together AI
A cloud platform for running, fine-tuning, and training open-source AI models. Together AI provides an inference API for popular open models (LLaMA, Mistral,...
Twelve-Factor App
A methodology of twelve principles for building modern cloud-native applications, published by Heroku co-founder Adam Wiggins in 2011. Key factors: store...
Val Town
A social website for writing and deploying small programs (called 'vals') that run on the server. Each val is a TypeScript function that gets its own URL...
Virtualization
Virtualization creates virtual versions of physical computing resources using a software layer called a hypervisor. The hypervisor (Type 1 like VMware ESXi or...
Virtual Machine
A software emulation of a complete computer system that runs its own operating system and applications in isolation from the host. System VMs (like those...
Virtual Network
A software-defined network that provides isolated Layer 2 or Layer 3 connectivity between virtual machines or containers without requiring dedicated physical...
VM
Abbreviation for Virtual Machine — either a system-level VM that emulates complete hardware (managed by hypervisors like KVM or ESXi) or a process-level VM...
VPC Peering
A networking connection between two Virtual Private Clouds that enables private IP communication without traversing the public internet. Traffic stays on the...

Related Topics