Lesson 06 - Group 2: Cloud Architecture, Virtualization, and Automation

Centralized computing

Processing and storage occur in one central location that users and devices depend upon.

Decentralized computing

Processing and storage are distributed across multiple devices or locations.

What are examples of decentralized computing?

Blockchain, peer-to-peer networks, CDNs, IoT, distributed databases, and TOR.

Replication

Maintaining copies of data or services to improve availability and recovery.

Local replication

Replicating resources within a local area or availability zone.

Regional replication

Replicating resources across locations within a geographic region.

GRS

Geo-Redundant Storage; replicates data across geographically separate locations.

High availability across zones

Deploying redundant resources in separate availability zones to reduce the effect of a single-zone failure.

Application virtualization

Running an application in an isolated or remotely delivered environment rather than installing it conventionally on each endpoint.

Virtual machine

A virtualized system containing its own guest operating system, applications, libraries, and dependencies.

Container

A lightweight isolated application environment that shares the host operating-system kernel.

Container versus virtual machine

Containers share the host OS and are lighter, while each VM contains a complete guest operating system.

VPC

Virtual Private Cloud; a private network segment made available to one cloud customer within a public-cloud environment.

Serverless computing

A model in which the provider manages infrastructure, allocates resources automatically, and charges based on actual execution or usage.

Microservices

An application architecture consisting of small, independent services focused on specific business capabilities.

IaC

Infrastructure as Code; deploying and configuring infrastructure through machine-readable configuration files or code.

What is a primary benefit of IaC?

Consistent, repeatable, and automated infrastructure deployment.

Auto-scaling

Automatically increasing or decreasing resources in response to workload demand.

Edge computing

Processing data closer to the users or devices that generate it to improve responsiveness.

How does load balancing support cloud responsiveness?

It distributes workloads across multiple available resources.

SDN

Software-Defined Networking; separates network decision-making, traffic forwarding, and monitoring into logical planes.

Control plane

Determines how traffic should be prioritized, secured, switched, and routed.

Data plane

Performs the actual switching and routing of traffic and applies access controls.

Management plane

Monitors traffic conditions and network status.

What is a security benefit of SDN?

It centralizes and automates policy enforcement across network devices.

What can SDN automatically provision?

Network links, appliances, and servers.

What major cloud-architecture factors should be evaluated?

Cost, scalability, resilience, deployment, recovery, SLAs, power, and compute requirements.

What cloud-security considerations are emphasized in Lesson 6?

Data protection, patching, secure communications, and secure access.

SD-WAN

Software-Defined Wide Area Network; applies software-defined control to WAN connectivity.

SASE

Secure Access Service Edge; a cloud-oriented architecture for providing secure access and networking service