Glossary of Terms
Common Technical Terms and Definitions:
Cloud & Cloud Computing: Generally refers to accessing computing elements across the internet with no knowledge of the technical implementation supporting the requested resources. Encompasses, SaaS and now extends to Hardware as a Service and Platform as a Service.
Computing resources: the collection of computer hardware,storage, network, switches and routers that provide the raw physical horsepower for computing. Operated with some general purpose or specialized operating system and most often with various pieces of middleware software to support general purpose services to applications software.
Federation: is a unified representation across different instances of the same technology type, e.g. identity, cloud services, messages, etc. In this context we are especially interested in the federation of all cloud service types and distributions.
Infrastructure as a Service - IaaS: Extends the principle of SaaS to offer pay-as-you-go access to remote hardware resources (e.g. CPU, memory, storage, network, I/O, etc.) Amazon EC2 is a leading example of IaaS.
Platform as a Service - PaaS: Extends the principle of SaaS to offer pay-as-you-go access to complete business application computing platforms – HW (most often as IaaS), OS, App server, database, message queues. Microsoft Azure is a leading example of PaaS.
Service Oriented Architecture - SOA: The general principle guiding modern software applications development to create loosely coupled discrete software functions and expose, call and manage them via open standards and protocols.
Software as a Service - SaaS: the principle of delivering business functionality through computer software accessed via the internet with no software installed on site. The first real example of the pay-as-you-go business model in modern software development.
Virtualization: provides a software interface to completely abstract operating systems from the physical hardware layer. You can manage your computing resource via a logical software layer. The prime benefit of virtualization is better utilization of hardware.
Virtual Machine - VM: is a software implementation of a machine (i.e. a computer) that executes programs like a physical machine, and provides an API to allow external programmatic interaction with the with the VM.
