Glossary
Collection of key terms and definitions of cloud computing infrastructures, IaC, Terraform / OpenTF, Ansible, Kubernetes & AWS.
AWS Services (54) See all
AWS Management and Governance
AWS Organizations
AWS Organizations lets you manage many AWS accounts centrally: organizational units, consolidated billing and service control policies to set guardrails.
AWS Databases
AWS Aurora
Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud, with storage replicated across three Availability Zones.
AWS Security, Identity and Compliance
AWS WAF
AWS WAF is a web application firewall that filters HTTP requests with rules and managed rule groups to block SQL injection, XSS, bots and abusive traffic.
AWS Databases
AWS ElastiCache
Amazon ElastiCache is a managed in-memory data store and cache compatible with Valkey, Redis OSS and Memcached, for microsecond latency.
AWS Management and Governance
AWS Systems Manager
AWS Systems Manager (SSM) manages servers at scale: Session Manager shell access without SSH, Parameter Store, Patch Manager, Run Command and Automation.
AWS Networking and Content Delivery
AWS API Gateway
Amazon API Gateway is a managed service to create, publish, secure and monitor REST, HTTP and WebSocket APIs in front of Lambda functions and other backends.
AWS Application Integration
AWS SQS
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a managed message queue that decouples the components of an application, with standard and FIFO queues.
AWS Application Integration
AWS SNS
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a managed publish/subscribe service that sends messages to email, SMS, HTTP endpoints, SQS and Lambda.
AWS Management and Governance
AWS CloudTrail
AWS CloudTrail records the API calls and account activity in AWS, so you can audit who did what, when and from where, and investigate security incidents.
AWS Management and Governance
AWS CloudWatch
Amazon CloudWatch collects metrics, logs and events from AWS resources and applications, and offers dashboards, alarms and automated actions.
AWS Containers
AWS ECR
Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) is a managed registry to store, scan and share Docker and OCI container images with ECS, EKS and Lambda.
AWS Containers
AWS EKS
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) runs a managed, highly available Kubernetes control plane on AWS and integrates it with VPC, IAM and load balancers.
AWS Storage
AWS EFS
Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) is a managed, elastic NFS file system that many Linux EC2 instances, containers and Lambda functions can share.
AWS Databases
AWS DynamoDB
Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed, serverless NoSQL key-value and document database with single-digit millisecond latency at any scale.
AWS Compute
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda runs your code in response to events without servers to manage, and you pay only for the time the code runs. It is the core of AWS serverless.
AWS Security, Identity and Compliance
AWS Certificate Manager (ACM)
AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) issues, stores and automatically renews free public TLS certificates for load balancers, CloudFront and API Gateway.
AWS Security, Identity and Compliance
AWS Secrets Manager
AWS Secrets Manager stores, retrieves and automatically rotates database credentials, API keys and other secrets, encrypted with AWS KMS.
AWS Security, Identity and Compliance
AWS KMS
AWS Key Management Service (KMS) creates and controls the cryptographic keys that encrypt data in S3, EBS, RDS, Secrets Manager and many other AWS services.
AWS Networking and Content Delivery
AWS Regions and Availability Zones
AWS Regions are separate geographic areas, each made of several isolated Availability Zones. Choose them for latency, compliance, price and resilience.
AWS Networking and Content Delivery
AWS Elastic IP
An Elastic IP address is a static public IPv4 address that belongs to your AWS account and can be moved between instances or NAT Gateways.
AWS Networking and Content Delivery
AWS Route Tables
A route table contains the rules that decide where the network traffic of a VPC subnet is sent: the local network, an Internet Gateway, a NAT Gateway and more.
AWS Networking and Content Delivery
AWS Network ACLs
A network access control list (NACL) is a stateless firewall that allows or denies traffic at the subnet level of an AWS VPC, using numbered rules.
AWS Networking and Content Delivery
AWS Security Groups
A security group is a stateful virtual firewall that controls the inbound and outbound traffic of AWS resources such as EC2 instances and databases.
AWS Compute
AWS Auto Scaling
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling keeps the right number of EC2 instances running, replaces unhealthy ones and adds or removes capacity as the load changes.
AWS Networking and Content Delivery
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) distributes incoming traffic across healthy targets in several Availability Zones: Application, Network and Gateway load balancers.
AWS Application Integration
AWS Kinesis
Amazon Kinesis collects, processes and analyzes real-time streaming data: Data Streams, Data Firehose and Managed Service for Apache Flink.
AWS Application Integration
AWS Step Functions
AWS Step Functions is a serverless workflow service that coordinates Lambda functions and AWS services using state machines.
AWS Application Integration
AWS EventBridge
Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus that routes events from AWS services, SaaS applications and your own code to targets using rules.
AWS Databases
AWS Redshift
Amazon Redshift is a managed, columnar data warehouse for large-scale SQL analytics, available as provisioned clusters or serverless.
AWS Analytics and AI
AWS Athena
Amazon Athena runs SQL queries directly on data stored in Amazon S3, without servers, and charges per amount of data scanned.
AWS Networking and Content Delivery
AWS Transit Gateway
AWS Transit Gateway is a regional network hub that connects VPCs, VPN connections and Direct Connect with transitive routing.
AWS Management and Governance
AWS Config
AWS Config records the configuration of AWS resources over time and evaluates them against rules for compliance and auditing.
AWS Security, Identity and Compliance
AWS Security Hub
AWS Security Hub aggregates security findings from AWS services and partners and checks accounts against standards such as CIS and AWS Foundational Best Practices.
AWS Networking and Content Delivery
AWS PrivateLink
AWS PrivateLink provides private connectivity between VPCs and AWS services or your own services using interface endpoints, without Internet access.
AWS Security, Identity and Compliance
AWS Cognito
Amazon Cognito provides user sign-up, sign-in and access control for web and mobile apps, with user pools and identity pools.
AWS Security, Identity and Compliance
AWS GuardDuty
Amazon GuardDuty is a managed threat detection service that analyzes CloudTrail, VPC flow and DNS logs to find compromised resources and attacks.
AWS Management and Governance
AWS Control Tower
AWS Control Tower sets up and governs a secure multi-account AWS environment (landing zone) with guardrails, account factory and centralized logging.
AWS Security, Identity and Compliance
AWS IAM Identity Center
AWS IAM Identity Center (formerly AWS SSO) gives people single sign-on access to multiple AWS accounts and applications with permission sets.
AWS Analytics and AI
AWS Bedrock
Amazon Bedrock is a managed service to build generative AI applications with foundation models from several providers through a single API.
AWS Analytics and AI
AWS Glue
AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service with a data catalog, crawlers and ETL jobs to prepare data for analytics.
AWS Networking and Content Delivery
AWS NAT Gateway
An AWS NAT Gateway is a managed service that allows instances in a private subnet to connect to the Internet while keeping them secure.
AWS Security, Identity and Compliance
AWS IAM
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a web service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that enables users to securely control access to AWS…
AWS Networking and Content Delivery
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) service provided by AWS.
AWS Networking and Content Delivery
AWS Route 53
Amazon Route 53 is a scalable and highly available Domain Name System (DNS) web service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS).
AWS Databases
AWS RDS
AWS RDS is a fully managed service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that simplifies the setup, operation, and scaling of relational databases in the cloud.
AWS Storage
AWS EBS
Block storage for persistent data for EC2 instances. Instance storage for the operating system uses EBS volumes.
AWS Networking and Content Delivery
AWS Internet Gateway
An AWS Internet Gateway is a component that facilitates communication between instances within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and the Internet
AWS Containers
AWS Fargate
AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers that runs ECS and EKS workloads without managing servers or clusters of instances.
AWS Containers
AWS ECS
Amazon ECS is a fully managed container orchestration service to deploy, manage and scale Docker containers on EC2 instances or AWS Fargate.
AWS Networking and Content Delivery
AWS Subnets
AWS Subnets are segmented sections within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
AWS Networking and Content Delivery
AWS VPC
An AWS VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) is a virtual network dedicated to an AWS account.
AWS Storage
AWS S3
Amazon S3 is a highly scalable and durable object storage service for data storage, backup, content distribution, archiving and cloud-native applications.
AWS Compute
AWS EC2
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a web service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that provides resizable and scalable compute capacity in the cloud.
AWS Compute
AWS AMI
AWS AMI, or Amazon Machine Image, is a pre-configured virtual machine image used to create and launch Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances
Cloud Platforms (7) See all
- Cloud Platforms
Google Cloud
Google Cloud (GCP) is the Google public cloud, managed with Terraform and OpenTofu through the google provider.
- Cloud Platforms
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure is the Microsoft public cloud, which Terraform and OpenTofu manage with the azurerm provider.
- Cloud Platforms
AWS
AWS (Amazon Web Services) is the largest public cloud, managed as code with Terraform and OpenTofu through the aws provider and the AWS CLI.
Cloud Platforms
Oracle Cloud
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is the Oracle public cloud, managed with Terraform and OpenTofu through the oci provider published by Oracle.
Cloud Platforms
Alibaba Cloud
Alibaba Cloud is a public cloud with ECS, VPC and OSS services, managed with Terraform and OpenTofu through the alicloud provider.
Cloud Platforms
OpenStack
OpenStack is open source software to build private and public clouds, managed with Terraform and OpenTofu through the openstack provider.
Cloud Platforms
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean is a cloud with Droplets, VPCs, firewalls and managed services, managed with Terraform and OpenTofu through the digitalocean provider.
Infrastructure as Code (17) See all
Infrastructure as Code
AWS CloudFormation
AWS CloudFormation is the native infrastructure as code service of AWS: describe resources in JSON or YAML templates and it manages them as stacks.
Infrastructure as Code
Packer
Packer is a HashiCorp tool that builds identical machine images, such as AWS AMIs and Docker images, from a single configuration file.
- Infrastructure as Code
HCP Terraform
HCP Terraform (formerly Terraform Cloud) is the HashiCorp managed service that stores state, runs plans remotely and applies policies for teams.
- Infrastructure as Code
Pulumi
Pulumi is an infrastructure as code tool where you describe cloud resources in general-purpose languages such as TypeScript, Python and Go.
Infrastructure as Code
OpenTofu
OpenTofu is the open-source, Linux Foundation fork of Terraform for Infrastructure as Code, compatible with Terraform providers and HCL.
- Infrastructure as Code
TFLint
TFLint is a linter for Terraform and OpenTofu that finds errors, deprecated syntax and invalid provider values before you run plan or apply.
- Infrastructure as Code
Infracost
Infracost estimates the monthly cost of Terraform and OpenTofu changes and shows the difference in pull requests before you deploy.
- Infrastructure as Code
Terragrunt
Terragrunt is a thin wrapper for Terraform and OpenTofu that keeps configuration DRY across many environments, accounts and regions.
- Infrastructure as Code
Terraform
Terraform is an infrastructure as code tool by HashiCorp that creates and changes cloud resources from declarative configuration files.
- Infrastructure as Code
Configuration Drift
Configuration drift is the difference between the real infrastructure and its Terraform code or state, caused by manual changes. Learn how to detect and fix it.
- Infrastructure as Code
Terraform Backend
A Terraform backend defines where the state is stored and how operations run. Learn the S3 backend, locking and how to migrate between backends.
- Infrastructure as Code
Terraform Workspace
A Terraform workspace is a named state inside the same backend and configuration, used to create several copies of an infrastructure.
- Infrastructure as Code
Terraform State
The Terraform state is the file where Terraform and OpenTofu record which real resources they manage, so they can plan and apply changes.
- Infrastructure as Code
Terraform Module
A Terraform module is a reusable set of resources in a directory, with input variables and outputs. Learn how modules work in Terraform and OpenTofu.
- Infrastructure as Code
Terraform Provider
A Terraform provider is a plugin that lets Terraform and OpenTofu manage resources of a platform such as AWS, Azure or Kubernetes through its API.
- Infrastructure as Code
Terraform Built-in Functions
Terraform functions perform specific tasks on configuration data: numeric, string, collection, date and time, file system and more.
- Infrastructure as Code
HCL
HCL is a domain-specific language developed by HashiCorp, a company known for its infrastructure automation tools such as Terraform, Vault, Consul, and Nomad.
Configuration and Automation (4) See all
Configuration and Automation
Vagrant
Vagrant is a HashiCorp tool that creates reproducible local virtual machines from a Vagrantfile, usually on VirtualBox.
Configuration and Automation
Ansible
Ansible is an agentless automation tool that configures servers and deploys applications over SSH using YAML playbooks.
Configuration and Automation
Cloud-init
Cloud-init is a multi-distribution package that handles the early initialization of cloud instances.
- Configuration and Automation
Ansible Dynamic Inventory
Generate inventory (host and group information) dynamically rather than statically defining it in a static inventory file
Containers and Orchestration (22) See all
Containers and Orchestration
Dockerfile
A Dockerfile is a text file with the instructions to build a container image: base image, files, commands, user and the command to run.
- Containers and Orchestration
Docker Compose
Docker Compose defines and runs multi-container applications from a single YAML file: services, networks and volumes started with one command.
Containers and Orchestration
Rancher Desktop
Rancher Desktop is a free open source app with a container engine (containerd or dockerd) and a local K3s Kubernetes cluster for Linux, macOS and Windows.
- Containers and Orchestration
Docker
Docker is a platform to build, ship and run applications in containers: lightweight, isolated processes created from portable images.
Containers and Orchestration
Podman
Podman is a daemonless, rootless container engine that runs OCI containers with a command line compatible with Docker.
- Containers and Orchestration
Kubernetes Pod
A Pod is the smallest deployable unit of Kubernetes: one or more containers that share an IP address, ports and volumes and are scheduled together.
Containers and Orchestration
Helm
Helm is the package manager for Kubernetes: it installs and upgrades applications from versioned charts with configurable values.
- Containers and Orchestration
BuildKit
BuildKit is the modern build engine of Docker: parallel, cache-aware and able to build multi-platform images with docker buildx.
- Containers and Orchestration
RBAC (Role-Based Access Control)
RBAC in Kubernetes grants permissions to users, groups and service accounts with Roles and ClusterRoles bound by RoleBindings and ClusterRoleBindings.
Containers and Orchestration
K3s
K3s is a lightweight, certified Kubernetes distribution packaged as a single binary, ideal for development, edge and small clusters.
Containers and Orchestration
Kubernetes
Kubernetes is an open source platform that deploys, scales and operates containerized applications across a cluster of machines.
- Containers and Orchestration
Persistent Volume
A PersistentVolume is a piece of cluster storage that outlives pods; applications request it with a PersistentVolumeClaim, often created by a StorageClass.
- Containers and Orchestration
Kubernetes Dashboard
The Kubernetes Dashboard is the official web interface to view and manage the workloads, services and configuration of a cluster.
- Containers and Orchestration
kubectl
kubectl is the command line client of Kubernetes: it sends requests to the API server to create, inspect, change and debug cluster resources.
- Containers and Orchestration
Kubernetes Service
A Kubernetes Service gives a changing set of pods a stable virtual IP and DNS name and load balances traffic to them: ClusterIP, NodePort or LoadBalancer.
- Containers and Orchestration
nerdctl
nerdctl is a Docker-compatible command line client for containerd, with support for Compose, image building and lazy pulling.
Containers and Orchestration
containerd
containerd is the industry standard container runtime that pulls images and manages the lifecycle of containers for Docker and Kubernetes.
- Containers and Orchestration
Kubernetes Ingress
A Kubernetes Ingress defines HTTP and HTTPS routing rules by host and path to Services and is implemented by an Ingress controller such as NGINX or Traefik.
Containers and Orchestration
Kustomize
Kustomize customizes Kubernetes YAML without templates: a base of manifests plus overlays that patch them for each environment.
- Containers and Orchestration
Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA)
The Horizontal Pod Autoscaler changes the number of replicas of a Kubernetes workload automatically from CPU, memory or custom metrics.
Containers and Orchestration
kind
kind (Kubernetes in Docker) creates local Kubernetes clusters using Docker containers as nodes, ideal for development and CI.
- Containers and Orchestration
Kubernetes Deployment
A Kubernetes Deployment keeps a desired number of identical pods running and updates them with rolling updates and rollbacks through ReplicaSets.
CI/CD and GitOps (5) See all
CI/CD and GitOps
GitHub
GitHub is the most popular platform to host Git repositories, review code and automate delivery with pull requests and CI/CD.
CI/CD and GitOps
Argo CD
Argo CD is a declarative GitOps continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes that keeps a cluster in sync with the manifests stored in Git.
- CI/CD and GitOps
LocalStack
LocalStack is a local emulator of AWS services that runs in a container, so you can test Terraform and applications without an AWS account.
CI/CD and GitOps
Git
Git is the distributed version control system that stores the history of your code and infrastructure files and lets teams work on them together.
CI/CD and GitOps
GitHub Actions
GitHub Actions is the CI/CD service of GitHub that runs workflows defined in YAML files when events happen in a repository.
Observability (2) See all
Observability
Prometheus
Prometheus is an open source monitoring system that scrapes metrics from your services, stores them as time series and fires alerts.
Observability
Grafana
Grafana is an open source platform to build dashboards and alerts from metrics, logs and traces stored in many data sources.
Security (6) See all
Security
HashiCorp Vault
HashiCorp Vault is a secrets manager that stores, generates and encrypts credentials, tokens and keys with fine-grained access control and audit logs.
- Security
Checkov
Checkov is an open source static analysis tool that scans Terraform, Kubernetes and Dockerfile code for security and compliance misconfigurations.
Security
Trivy
Trivy is an open source security scanner that finds vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and secrets in container images, code and infrastructure files.
Security
cert-manager
cert-manager is a Kubernetes add-on that issues and renews TLS certificates automatically, for example from Let's Encrypt.
Security
GnuPG
GnuPG (GPG) is the free implementation of OpenPGP used to sign and encrypt files, emails and software packages with key pairs.
Security
Public Key Authentication
A public key is a cryptographic key that is part of a key pair used for public key cryptography.
Data and Storage (6) See all
- Data and Storage
NFS
NFS (Network File System) shares a directory over the network so several machines or Kubernetes pods can mount the same files.
Data and Storage
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL is a powerful open source relational database known for its standards compliance, extensions and reliability.
Data and Storage
MySQL
MySQL is a widely used open source relational database, available as a managed engine in Amazon RDS and Aurora.
- Data and Storage
rsync
rsync is a command line tool that copies and synchronizes files locally or over SSH, sending only the differences between source and destination.
Data and Storage
Redis
Redis is an open source in-memory data store used as a cache, message broker and fast key-value database.
Data and Storage
MariaDB
MariaDB is an open source relational database forked from MySQL, offered as a managed engine in Amazon RDS.
Networking and Delivery (5) See all
Networking and Delivery
NGINX
NGINX is a fast web server, reverse proxy and load balancer used to serve sites and route traffic to applications.
Networking and Delivery
Istio
Istio is an open source service mesh for Kubernetes that adds traffic routing, security and observability between services without changing the code.
Networking and Delivery
Traefik
Traefik is a cloud native reverse proxy and ingress controller that discovers services automatically and routes HTTP traffic to them.
Networking and Delivery
Cloudflare
Cloudflare is a global network for DNS, CDN, TLS and web security, managed with Terraform and OpenTofu through the cloudflare provider.
- Networking and Delivery
OSI model
The OSI model is a conceptual framework that describes how a network functions, split into seven layers.
Operating Systems and Virtualization (5) See all
- Operating Systems and Virtualization
jq
jq is a command line JSON processor that filters, transforms and formats the output of APIs and CLIs such as the AWS CLI and kubectl.
Operating Systems and Virtualization
VirtualBox
VirtualBox is a free, open source hypervisor from Oracle that runs virtual machines on a desktop or laptop.
- Operating Systems and Virtualization
Cron
Cron is the Unix scheduler that runs commands at fixed times, defined with five-field cron expressions in a crontab file, also used by Kubernetes and AWS.
Operating Systems and Virtualization
Ubuntu
Ubuntu is a popular Debian based Linux distribution used on laptops, servers and as the base of many cloud and container images.
- Operating Systems and Virtualization
SSH
SSH, which stands for Secure Shell, is a cryptographic network protocol that allows for secure communication and data transfer between two computers over an…
Concepts and Practices (2) See all
- Concepts and Practices
Regular Expressions (Regex)
A regular expression is a pattern that matches text. It is used to search, validate and replace text in code, command line tools and infrastructure files.
- Concepts and Practices
IaC
IaC is an approach to managing and provisioning computing infrastructure through machine-readable code and automation, rather than manual processes.