Cloud glossary

Autoscaling automatically adds compute capacity when demand rises and removes it when demand falls, driven by rules y…

A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a globally distributed set of servers that caches copies of your content close to…

Cloud migration is moving applications, data, and the workloads around them off infrastructure you own, on-premise se…

A container packages an application with everything it needs to run (code, runtime, libraries, settings) into one por…

Egress fees are the charges cloud providers bill for data leaving their network: out to the internet, to another regi…

High availability (HA) means designing a system to keep serving users when individual components fail, usually by run…

IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS are the three levels of cloud service: IaaS rents you raw infrastructure (servers, storage, netw…

IAM (Identity and Access Management) is the cloud service that controls who and what can act in your account, and exa…

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) means defining your cloud resources (networks, servers, databases, permissions) in versi…

Kubernetes (K8s) is the open source system that runs containers across a fleet of machines: it schedules them, restar…

A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and distributes incoming requests across them, so no single machi…

A managed database is a database service the cloud provider operates for you: they run the servers, patching, backups…

Object storage holds data as objects, a file plus its metadata and a unique key, in containers called buckets, access…

A region is a geographic area where a cloud provider runs data centres, AWS us-east-1, Azure Canada Central. An avail…

Serverless means running code without provisioning or managing servers: the provider handles capacity, scaling, and p…

A VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) is your own logically isolated private network inside a public cloud. You define its IP…