Glossary

Glossary

Find the most important terms related to cloud computing, Kubernetes, and DevOps. Click on a term to learn more.

Core Concepts

More Terms

A

Abstraction A representation that hides technical details from the user, making a system more general and easier to understand.

Agile Software Development A collection of practices with iterative development cycles and self-organizing teams. The goal is to respond quickly to change.

API (Application Programming Interface) An interface that enables communication between different programs.

API Gateway A tool that aggregates individual application APIs and makes them available through a single entry point.

Autoscaling The ability of a system to scale automatically, typically compute resources such as CPU or memory.

B

Bare Metal Machine A physical computer (typically a server) running a single operating system without a virtualization layer.

Blue Green Deployment A deployment strategy for updating applications with minimal downtime. Two identical environments are maintained, and traffic is switched between them.

C

Canary Deployment A deployment strategy where an updated version is deployed alongside the live environment, initially without live traffic. Traffic is gradually shifted after successful validation.

Client-Server Architecture An architectural pattern where application logic is split across two or more components: clients that send requests and servers that respond to them.

Cloud Native Apps Applications specifically designed to take advantage of cloud computing innovations like containerization, microservices, and automation.

Cloud Native Security An approach to integrating security standards into cloud native applications throughout the entire development and operations lifecycle.

Cloud Native Technology Technologies used to build and run cloud native applications, including containers, service meshes, and declarative APIs.

Container as a Service (CaaS) A cloud service model for managing and deploying applications using container-based abstraction.

Container Registry A repository for storing and distributing container images. In lowcloud, you connect an external container registry to build and deploy your apps.

Containerization Bundling an application and all its dependencies into a container image that can run independently of the environment.

D

Decentralized Apps Applications whose functionality is split into multiple smaller, independent parts that can be operated independently.

DevSecOps The integration of development, operations, and security responsibilities into a unified process.

Distributed System A collection of autonomous computers connected via a network that appear to the user as a single system.

F

Function as a Service (FaaS) Serverless cloud services that execute code in response to events without requiring the user to manage servers.

H

Horizontal Scaling A technique for increasing system capacity by adding more nodes or instances.

I

Immutable Infrastructure An infrastructure approach where resources, once provisioned, are never modified but instead completely recreated when changes are needed.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) A cloud model that provides physical or virtualized compute resources on a pay-as-you-go basis.

L

Loosely Coupled Architecture An architectural style where components are independent of each other and communicate through well-defined interfaces.

M

Monolithic Application An application that contains all functionality in a single, cohesive program.

mTLS (Mutual Transport Layer Security) A technique for mutual authentication and encryption of communication between two services.

N

Nodes Computers that work together in a cluster to accomplish a shared task. In Kubernetes, there are control plane nodes and worker nodes.

O

Observability A property that describes how well the internal state of a system can be understood from the outside, typically through logs, metrics, and traces.

P

Platform as a Service (PaaS) An external platform that enables developers to deploy and run applications without managing the underlying infrastructure.

R

Reliability Describes how well a system responds to failures and maintains its operations.

S

Scalability The ability of a system to handle growing demands and expand its capacity accordingly.

Self Healing The ability of a system to recover from certain failures automatically and without human intervention.

Service In the cloud context, a microservice with independent functionality that is accessible through defined interfaces.

Service Discovery The process by which services find other services and their instances on the network.

Service Mesh An infrastructure layer that manages network traffic between services and provides features like reliability, observability, and security.

Service Proxy A component that intercepts network traffic, applies logic, and forwards it to the target service.

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) A discipline that combines operations and software engineering to run reliable and scalable systems.

Stateful Apps Applications that need to persist data in order to function properly. Databases are a typical example.

T

Tightly Coupled Architecture An architectural style where components are highly dependent on each other. Changes to one component often affect others.

Transport Layer Security (TLS) A protocol for encrypting and securing communication over a network.

V

Vertical Scaling A technique for increasing system capacity by adding CPU and memory to individual nodes.

Virtual Machine (VM) A virtual computer with its own operating system, not tied to specific hardware, using virtualization for resource sharing.

Z

Zero Trust Architecture A security approach for designing IT systems where no user or device is automatically trusted.