Cloud Computing Abbreviations
63 abbreviations · part of Technology & Computer Abbreviations
Abbreviations from cloud computing and operations: service models (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS), service names from AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle, virtualization and containers (VM, K8s), reliability targets (SLA, SLO, RTO) and infrastructure practices such as IaC and DevOps. Provider service names change over time, so entries note renamings where relevant.
| Abbreviation | Stands for | Description |
|---|---|---|
| AIOps | Artificial intelligence for IT operations | The use of machine learning and analytics on IT monitoring data, such as logs, metrics and alerts, to detect anomalies, group related alerts, find root causes and… |
| AKS | Azure Kubernetes Service | Microsoft Azure's managed Kubernetes service, which runs the control plane for customers and integrates with Microsoft Entra ID, Azure networking and Azure monitoring… |
| AMI | Amazon Machine Image | A template containing the operating system, software and configuration used to launch EC2 instances. |
| APM | Application performance monitoring | Tools that track how applications behave in production, measuring response times, error rates, throughput and traces of individual requests across services, to find… |
| ARN | Amazon Resource Name | A unique identifier for any resource in AWS, written in the form arn:partition:service:region:account-id:resource, used in IAM policies, API calls and cross-account… |
| AWS | Amazon Web Services | Amazon's cloud computing division and the world's largest cloud provider by revenue, offering more than 200 services, including computing, storage, databases… |
| AZ | Availability zone | One or more physically separate data centers within a cloud region, each with independent power, cooling and networking, linked to the other zones by low-latency… |
| BaaS | Backend as a service | A cloud service that supplies ready-made backend features for web and mobile apps, such as authentication, databases, file storage and push notifications, through SDKs… |
| CaaS | Containers as a service | A cloud model in which the provider runs and manages container infrastructure, so customers deploy containerized applications without operating the underlying servers… |
| CDK | Cloud Development Kit | An AWS framework for defining cloud infrastructure in general-purpose programming languages such as TypeScript, Python, Java and C#, which it converts into… |
| CNCF | Cloud Native Computing Foundation | The Linux Foundation project that hosts Kubernetes and many other open-source cloud tools, such as Prometheus, Envoy, containerd and Argo, and runs the KubeCon… |
| CSP | Cloud service provider | A company that offers cloud computing services, such as infrastructure, platforms or software, to customers over the internet. |
| DaaS | Desktop as a service | A cloud service that hosts complete virtual desktops, with operating system, applications and files, and streams them to users on any device. |
| DBaaS | Database as a service | A managed cloud offering that runs databases for customers, handling provisioning, backups, patching, replication and scaling. |
| DevOps | Development and operations | A culture and set of practices that bring software development and IT operations together, using automation, continuous integration and delivery, monitoring and shared… |
| DR | Disaster recovery | The policies, tools and procedures for restoring IT systems and data after a major disruption such as a data center outage, natural disaster, cyberattack or accidental… |
| EBS | Elastic Block Store | Persistent block storage for EC2 instances, providing virtual disks called volumes that survive instance restarts and can be backed up with snapshots. |
| EC2 | Elastic Compute Cloud | The core AWS service for renting virtual servers, called instances, billed by the second or hour, in sizes from tiny burstable machines to GPU servers for AI training. |
| ECS | Elastic Container Service | AWS's own container orchestration service for running Docker containers on EC2 instances or on serverless Fargate capacity, without operating Kubernetes. |
| EFS | Elastic File System | A managed network file system from AWS that many EC2 instances, containers and Lambda functions can mount at the same time using the NFS protocol, growing and shrinking… |
| EKS | Elastic Kubernetes Service | The managed Kubernetes offering on AWS, which runs the Kubernetes control plane for customers while their workloads run on EC2 nodes or Fargate. |
| ELB | Elastic Load Balancing | Spreads incoming traffic across EC2 instances, containers and IP addresses as a managed AWS service, with Application, Network and Gateway Load Balancer types. |
| FaaS | Function as a service | A serverless cloud model in which developers upload individual functions that run only when triggered by events, such as an HTTP request or a file upload, and are… |
| FedRAMP | Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program | The US government program that standardizes security assessment and authorization of cloud products used by federal agencies, based on NIST SP 800-53 controls at Low… |
| FinOps | Financial operations (cloud) | A practice in which finance, engineering and business teams collaborate to understand, control and optimize cloud spending, using cost visibility, allocation tags… |
| GCE | Google Compute Engine | Google Cloud's infrastructure-as-a-service offering for running virtual machines, with predefined and custom machine types, GPUs and TPUs, and per-second billing. |
| GCP | Google Cloud Platform | Google's public cloud, offering computing, storage, data analytics, machine learning and Kubernetes services built on the infrastructure behind Google Search and YouTube. |
| GCS | Google Cloud Storage | Google Cloud's object storage service for unstructured data, organized in buckets with storage classes from Standard to Archive, used for backups, data lakes, media and… |
| GKE | Google Kubernetes Engine | Google Cloud's managed Kubernetes service, run by the company that created Kubernetes, with an Autopilot mode that manages nodes automatically and bills per pod. |
| HA | High availability | The design of systems to keep running with minimal downtime by eliminating single points of failure, using redundant servers, automatic failover, load balancing and… |
| HCL | HashiCorp Configuration Language | A configuration language from HashiCorp used for Terraform, Packer, Nomad and Vault, with blocks, arguments and expressions designed to be readable by people and… |
| HPC | High-performance computing | Using supercomputers or clusters of powerful servers, often with GPUs and fast interconnects, to run very large calculations in parallel, such as weather forecasting… |
| IaaS | Infrastructure as a service | The cloud model that rents out raw computing resources, such as virtual machines, storage, networks and load balancers, on demand, while customers manage the operating… |
| IaC | Infrastructure as code | Managing servers, networks, databases and other infrastructure through machine-readable configuration files kept in version control instead of manual console clicks. |
| K8s | Kubernetes | An open-source platform for automating the deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications across clusters of machines. |
| KVM | Kernel-based Virtual Machine | A virtualization module built into the Linux kernel that turns Linux into a hypervisor able to run virtual machines with hardware acceleration. |
| LB | Load balancer | A device or service that distributes incoming requests across multiple servers, improving capacity and availability and removing unhealthy servers from rotation through… |
| MSP | Managed service provider | A company that remotely manages a client's IT infrastructure, cloud accounts, devices, security and help desk under an ongoing contract, usually for a monthly fee. |
| MTTR | Mean time to recovery | The average time it takes to restore a service after a failure or incident, from detection to full recovery. |
| OCI | Open Container Initiative | A Linux Foundation project that maintains open standards for container image formats, runtimes and distribution, so images built with Docker or other tools run on any… |
| OTel | OpenTelemetry | An open-source standard and set of tools for collecting telemetry, namely traces, metrics and logs, from applications in a vendor-neutral way, so the same… |
| PaaS | Platform as a service | A cloud model that provides a managed environment for building, running and scaling applications, handling servers, operating systems, runtimes and databases so… |
| RDS | Relational Database Service | Runs relational databases, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle and SQL Server, as a managed AWS service that handles backups, patching, replication and failover. |
| RHEL | Red Hat Enterprise Linux | A commercial Linux distribution from Red Hat, sold by subscription with long-term support, certified hardware and software, and security updates, and widely used on… |
| RI | Reserved instance | A billing commitment in which a cloud customer agrees to use a certain type of virtual machine or database for one or three years in exchange for a large discount, up… |
| RPO | Recovery point objective | The maximum acceptable amount of data loss after an incident, measured as time; an RPO of 15 minutes means backups or replication must capture data at least every 15… |
| RTO | Recovery time objective | The maximum acceptable time a system may stay unavailable after a disaster or outage before the business impact becomes unacceptable, used to design backup and disaster… |
| S3 | Simple Storage Service | Object storage from AWS that keeps files, called objects, in buckets with very high durability, used for websites, backups, data lakes and application assets. |
| SaaS | Software as a service | Software delivered over the internet on a subscription basis, with the provider hosting, maintaining and updating the application so customers simply log in through a… |
| SLA | Service-level agreement | Contract or contract section that defines the measurable level of service a provider commits to, such as 99.9 percent uptime, a four-hour response time or a two-day… |
| SLI | Service-level indicator | A measured metric that shows how a service is performing for users, such as request success rate, latency or throughput, used to track progress against service level… |
| SLO | Service-level objective | A specific, measurable reliability target for a service, such as 99.9 percent of requests succeeding or 95 percent of pages loading in under 300 milliseconds over 30… |
| SNS | Simple Notification Service | A publish-subscribe messaging service from AWS that pushes each message from a publisher to many subscribers at once, including queues, functions, HTTP endpoints, email… |
| SPOF | Single point of failure | Any component whose failure would stop an entire system, such as a lone database server, one network link, a single power supply or even one person with unique knowledge. |
| SQS | Simple Queue Service | A fully managed message queue on AWS that lets applications send, store and receive messages between components, so each part can work independently and absorb spikes… |
| SRE | Site reliability engineering | A discipline that applies software engineering to operations, keeping services reliable through automation, monitoring, incident response and measurable targets such as… |
| SSE | Server-side encryption | Encryption that a cloud storage service applies automatically when writing data to disk and removes when authorized users read it, protecting stored data without… |
| vCPU | Virtual central processing unit | A share of a physical processor assigned to a virtual machine, usually corresponding to one hardware thread of a CPU core. |
| VDI | Virtual desktop infrastructure | Technology that hosts users' desktop environments on central servers and streams them to laptops, thin clients or browsers, so applications and data stay in the data… |
| VM | Virtual machine | A software-based computer that runs its own operating system and applications on shared physical hardware, isolated from other VMs by a hypervisor. |
| VPC | Virtual private cloud | A logically isolated network inside a public cloud where customers define IP address ranges, subnets, route tables, gateways and firewall rules for their resources. |
| VPS | Virtual private server | A virtual machine sold by a hosting company as a private server with dedicated resources and full root access, usually for a fixed monthly price. |
| XaaS | Anything as a service | An umbrella term for the many cloud offerings sold as subscriptions, from software and platforms to security, desktops and even hardware, reflecting the shift from… |
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