Cloud Computing Fundamentals and Architecture – Vocabulary Flashcards

A comprehensive set of vocabulary flashcards covering key cloud computing concepts, service models, deployment models, virtualization techniques, cloud architectures, programming frameworks, and leading industry platforms such as AWS, Google AppEngine, Microsoft Azure, and Aneka.

Cloud Computing

An Internet-centric model for delivering configurable IT services on-demand, accessed via network and billed on a pay-per-use basis.

Computing Utility

The concept of IT resources being supplied like public utilities (water, electricity) – ubiquitously available and charged only for consumption.

Dynamic Provisioning

Automatic allocation and release of compute, storage, and network resources in response to workload changes.

Pay-per-Use

A pricing model where customers are charged only for the actual amount of resources or time they consume.

Service Orientation

An architectural approach in which software components are packaged as interoperable services with well-defined interfaces.

Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS)

The delivery of any IT component—hardware, platforms, or software—as an on-demand service.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

Cloud layer that supplies virtualised hardware, storage, and networking resources, letting users install their own software stack.

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

Cloud layer that offers a managed runtime environment and APIs for developers to build and deploy applications without managing underlying infrastructure.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

Cloud layer that delivers complete end-user applications over the Internet, requiring no local installation or maintenance.

Public Cloud

A cloud deployment owned by a third-party provider and offered to multiple tenants over the Internet.

Private Cloud

A cloud environment operated solely for one organisation, often on-premises, providing greater control and security.

Hybrid Cloud

A composition of private and public cloud resources that allows data and workload portability between them.

Community Cloud

A shared cloud infrastructure serving a specific community with common concerns, managed by the community or a third party.

Cloud Service Provider (CSP)

An organisation that owns and offers cloud services and infrastructure to consumers.

Cloud Service Consumer (CSC)

An individual or organisation that uses services provided by a cloud service provider.

Quality of Service (QoS)

Measurable service attributes (e.g., response time, availability) agreed upon between provider and consumer.

Service-Level Agreement (SLA)

A formal contract that defines QoS metrics, responsibilities, and penalties between cloud provider and consumer.

Virtualization

Technology that creates abstract versions of computing resources, enabling multiple isolated environments to share underlying hardware.

Hypervisor

Software (or firmware) layer that creates and manages virtual machines by abstracting hardware resources.

Type I Hypervisor

A native or bare-metal hypervisor that runs directly on hardware, e.g., VMware ESXi, Xen.

Type II Hypervisor

A hosted hypervisor that runs on top of an operating system, e.g., VirtualBox, VMware Workstation.

Full Virtualization

Virtualization technique providing a complete emulation of hardware so unmodified guest OSs can run unchanged.

Paravirtualization

Virtualization method in which the guest OS is aware of the hypervisor and uses special APIs (hypercalls) for better performance.

Hardware-Assisted Virtualization

CPU extensions (e.g., Intel VT-x, AMD-V) that allow efficient trap-and-emulate of privileged instructions for virtualization.

Operating-System-Level Virtualization

Technique that partitions the OS into multiple isolated user-space instances (containers), e.g., Docker, LXC.

Server Consolidation

Reducing physical servers by running several virtual machines on fewer hosts to increase utilisation and cut costs.

Live Migration

Moving a running virtual machine from one host to another with minimal downtime.

Distributed System

A collection of independent computers that appears to users as a single coherent system.

Cluster Computing

Tightly coupled networked computers acting as a single system for high-performance tasks.

Grid Computing

Geographically dispersed clusters federated to share heterogeneous resources as a utility.

Utility Computing

A business model delivering computing resources as metered utilities, aligning cost with usage.

MapReduce

A programming model that processes large data sets with parallel map and reduce functions across a cluster.

Google File System (GFS)

Google’s scalable, fault-tolerant distributed file system optimised for large streaming reads and appends.

Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS)

Open-source implementation of GFS, providing block-based, replicated storage for Hadoop jobs.

Big Data

Data sets whose volume, velocity, or variety exceed the capabilities of traditional database tools to capture, store, and analyse.

NoSQL

A class of non-relational, horizontally scalable data stores designed for flexible schemas and high throughput (e.g., Cassandra, MongoDB).

Amazon EC2

AWS service supplying resizable virtual compute capacity in the cloud.

Amazon S3

AWS object storage service that stores data as buckets and objects with RESTful access.

Elastic Block Store (EBS)

AWS block-level persistent storage volumes attachable to EC2 instances.

AWS CloudFormation

Service that lets users define and deploy AWS resources as code via JSON/YAML templates.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Platform-as-a-Service on AWS that automatically handles application deployment, scaling, and health monitoring.

Google AppEngine

Google’s PaaS offering that hosts scalable web applications inside sandboxed runtimes with integrated services.

Bigtable

Google’s distributed, column-family NoSQL store that underpins services like GAE Datastore.

Microsoft Azure Web Role

An Azure compute role optimised for IIS-based web applications.

Microsoft Azure Worker Role

An Azure compute role designed for background processing tasks.

SQL Azure

Relational Database-as-a-Service component of Microsoft Azure offering T-SQL compatible databases.

Azure AppFabric

Middleware layer providing service bus messaging, access control, and caching for Azure applications.

Aneka

A .NET-based cloud application platform offering multiple programming models (Task, Thread, MapReduce) for private, public, or hybrid clouds.

Aneka Container

The runtime unit in Aneka that hosts fabric, foundation, and execution services for cloud applications.

Platform Abstraction Layer (PAL)

Aneka component that hides OS/hardware differences and supplies uniform resource information.

Fabric Services (Aneka)

Lowest-level Aneka services handling resource provisioning and monitoring.

Foundation Services (Aneka)

Aneka services that support storage, accounting, reservation, and billing.

Execution Services (Aneka)

Aneka layer responsible for scheduling and executing application jobs/threads.

Task Programming Model (Aneka)

Abstraction where independent tasks (bag-of-tasks) are executed without inter-task communication.

Thread Programming Model (Aneka)

Extension of local multithreading where distributed threads run on remote Aneka nodes.

MapReduce Programming Model (Aneka)

Aneka’s implementation allowing users to define map and reduce functions executed across the cloud.

Public Cloud Deployment (Aneka)

A scenario where Aneka master and workers run entirely on virtual instances from a public IaaS provider.

Resource Provisioning Service (Aneka)

Component that dynamically acquires or releases virtual machines to meet application demand.

Thread

A single sequence of execution within a process, sharing memory with peer threads.

Multithreading

The ability of a CPU or program to manage multiple threads of execution concurrently.

Embarrassingly Parallel Problem

A computation that can be easily separated into independent tasks needing little or no inter-task communication.

Functional Decomposition

Parallel design approach that splits a program into distinct functions for concurrent execution.

Data Grid

Infrastructure providing distributed data discovery, transfer, and replication services for large scientific data sets.

Sector

An open-source data cloud combining the Sector Distributed File System with Sphere processing framework.

Twister

An enhanced MapReduce framework that supports iterative MapReduce computations with in-memory caching.

DryadLINQ

Microsoft research system combining LINQ with Dryad to express data-parallel computations as DAGs.

Amazon SQS

AWS messaging service offering reliable, scalable queues for decoupling distributed components.

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

AWS feature that provisions a logically isolated section of the AWS cloud with user-defined network topology.

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A distributed system of edge servers that deliver cached content to users based on geographic proximity.

Serverless Computing

Execution model where cloud provider dynamically manages infrastructure and users deploy code as stateless functions (e.g., AWS Lambda).

BigQuery

Google’s serverless, highly scalable data warehouse for fast SQL analytics on big data.

Container Orchestration

Automated deployment, scaling, and management of containerised applications, exemplified by Kubernetes.

Cloud Bursting

Technique where a private cloud adds computing capacity by offloading overflow to a public cloud.

Vendor Lock-In

Difficulty or cost associated with switching from one cloud provider or technology stack to another.

Serverless Storage (Object Store)

Highly durable, scalable storage that manages objects without user interaction with servers, e.g., S3, Azure Blob.

Edge Computing

Distributed computing paradigm that brings computation and data storage closer to data sources to reduce latency.

Auto-Scaling

Cloud capability that automatically adjusts the number of running instances based on demand or policies.

Live VM Migration

Process of moving a running virtual machine between hosts with negligible downtime to users.

Service Bus (Azure)

Middleware that provides reliable messaging and communication among distributed applications on Azure.

Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR)

Managed AWS service that provisions Hadoop clusters for big data processing using MapReduce, Spark, etc.