Cloud Essentials+ key terms

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.

The practice of allocating actual cloud costs back to the departments or teams that consumed them, encouraging accountability and informed consumption.

The ongoing practice of reducing cloud spend without harming required service levels, through right-sizing, removing idle resources, and choosing suitable pricing options.

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.

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.

Dependence on a provider's proprietary interfaces or services that makes moving elsewhere costly or difficult, reducing negotiating power and flexibility.

The ease with which applications and data can be moved between providers or environments, supported by open formats, standards, and avoiding proprietary dependencies.

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.

The policies and systems that authenticate users and services and authorize what each may do, forming the primary control boundary in cloud environments.

The principle of granting each identity only the permissions needed for its task and no more, limiting the damage possible if credentials are misused.

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.

The controlled lifecycle of cryptographic keys, including generation, storage, rotation, and destruction, which determines whether encryption actually protects data.

Separation between tenants, workloads, or networks so that activity in one cannot observe or affect another, a core requirement when infrastructure is shared.

Dividing a network into zones with controlled traffic between them, limiting how far an attacker can move after compromising one component.

Conformance with laws, regulations, standards, and contractual obligations that apply to data and services, demonstrated through audits, evidence, and controls.

Requirements or choices about the geographic location where data is stored and processed, driven by law, contract, or risk appetite.

A systematic examination of controls, logs, and evidence to verify that security and compliance requirements are actually met, often performed by an independent party.

Automated coordination of many resources or services, such as scheduling containers, scaling them, and recovering failed instances according to declared desired state.

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.

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.

A specific, measurable target for a service attribute, such as 99.9 percent monthly availability, that supports an SLA and guides operational decisions.

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.

The ability of a system to withstand faults and continue delivering service, often through redundancy, replication, and automated recovery from component failures.

The set of plans and technical measures for restoring services and data after a major disruption, characterized by recovery time and recovery point targets.

Recovery Time Objective: the maximum acceptable duration of service interruption after a disruption, defining how quickly a service must be restored.

Recovery Point Objective: the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time, indicating how recent a recovery point must be.

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.

Recording events and actions across systems so they can be reviewed, correlated, and used as evidence for troubleshooting, security investigation, and audit.

Continuous observation of metrics, logs, and health signals to detect degradation or incidents early and to inform capacity and performance decisions.

A user-facing interface through which consumers request, configure, and manage cloud resources without manual intervention by the provider's staff.