Cloud Essentials+ flashcards
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30 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.
- pay-per-use
- A pricing approach charging for measured consumption under the contract. Some minimum, reserved, storage, support or transfer charges can remain, so ending a compute task need not end all billing.
- chargeback
- The practice of allocating actual cloud costs back to the departments or teams that consumed them, encouraging accountability and informed consumption.
- cost optimization
- The ongoing practice of reducing cloud spend without harming required service levels, through right-sizing, removing idle resources, and choosing suitable pricing options.
- TCO
- Total Cost of Ownership: the full lifetime cost of an option, including acquisition, operations, staffing, migration, and exit costs, used to compare cloud with on-premises alternatives fairly.
- cloud migration
- The process of moving applications, data, and workloads from on-premises environments or one cloud to another, often following strategies such as rehosting, replatforming, or rebuilding.
- vendor lock-in
- Dependence on a provider's proprietary interfaces or services that makes moving elsewhere costly or difficult, reducing negotiating power and flexibility.
- portability
- The ease with which applications and data can be moved between providers or environments, supported by open formats, standards, and avoiding proprietary dependencies.
- shared responsibility model
- A division of security duties between provider and customer, where the provider secures the underlying infrastructure and the customer secures data, identities, and configuration in its control.
- identity and access management (IAM)
- The policies and systems that authenticate users and services and authorize what each may do, forming the primary control boundary in cloud environments.
- least privilege
- The principle of granting each identity only the permissions needed for its task and no more, limiting the damage possible if credentials are misused.
- encryption
- Transforming data using a key so that only authorized parties can read it, applied in transit over networks and at rest on storage to protect confidentiality.
- key management
- The controlled lifecycle of cryptographic keys, including generation, storage, rotation, and destruction, which determines whether encryption actually protects data.
- isolation
- Separation between tenants, workloads, or networks so that activity in one cannot observe or affect another, a core requirement when infrastructure is shared.
- network segmentation
- Dividing a network into zones with controlled traffic between them, limiting how far an attacker can move after compromising one component.
- compliance
- Conformance with laws, regulations, standards, and contractual obligations that apply to data and services, demonstrated through audits, evidence, and controls.
- data residency
- Requirements or choices about the geographic location where data is stored and processed, driven by law, contract, or risk appetite.
- audit
- A systematic examination of controls, logs, and evidence to verify that security and compliance requirements are actually met, often performed by an independent party.
- orchestration
- Automated coordination of many resources or services, such as scheduling containers, scaling them, and recovering failed instances according to declared desired state.
- auto-scaling
- A control mechanism that automatically adds or removes resources based on demand signals such as CPU load or queue length, helping match capacity to workload while controlling cost.
- service level agreement (SLA)
- A contract between provider and customer that states measurable service levels, such as availability or response time, and the remedies owed if those levels are missed.
- service level objective (SLO)
- A specific, measurable target for a service attribute, such as 99.9 percent monthly availability, that supports an SLA and guides operational decisions.
- availability
- A measure of whether a service meets its defined usable state over a specified window. A time-based target of99.9% permits43.2 minutes of unavailability in exactly thirty days, before any contractual exclusions.
- resilience
- The ability of a system to withstand faults and continue delivering service, often through redundancy, replication, and automated recovery from component failures.
- disaster recovery
- The set of plans and technical measures for restoring services and data after a major disruption, characterized by recovery time and recovery point targets.
- RTO
- Recovery Time Objective: the maximum acceptable duration of service interruption after a disruption, defining how quickly a service must be restored.
- RPO
- Recovery Point Objective: the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time, indicating how recent a recovery point must be.
- backup
- A copy of data kept separately so it can be restored after loss, corruption, or attack, with retention and restore testing determining its real value.
- logging
- Recording events and actions across systems so they can be reviewed, correlated, and used as evidence for troubleshooting, security investigation, and audit.
- monitoring
- Continuous observation of metrics, logs, and health signals to detect degradation or incidents early and to inform capacity and performance decisions.
- self-service portal
- A user-facing interface through which consumers request, configure, and manage cloud resources without manual intervention by the provider's staff.