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Glossary of Cloud Engineering Terms

Cloud Engineering encompasses a lot of technologies, tools, terms, abbreviations, and abstractions. To ease understanding, we've included a glossary of terms you may come across in practicing Cloud Engineering, both specific to Pulumi and broadly related to software development in this environment.

AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda is a serverless platform that allows for the execution of code or containers without the need to provision infrastructure yourself.

Azure Kubernetes Service

AKS is a managed container orchestration tool on Microsoft Azure, allowing for the deployment and automated management of containerized applications.

Build

As a verb, to compile your source code into an executable binary. As a noun, a version of your application as an executable binary.

CI/CD

The combination of Continuous Integration and either Continuous Deployment or Continuous Delivery. Broadly, this is the term for a set of tools and behaviors that allow you to automate everything that occurs between committing code and either delivering or deploying your application, including building, testing, vulnerability scanning, and promotion from development to production.

Cloud Engineering

A software development methodology wherein application development and delivery relies heavily on the use of cloud-based services and resources, rather than in-house or on-prem services such as hosting.

Compiler

A tool that translates an entire application written in one higher-level programming language into another lower-level language so that it can be executed. Examples of compiled languages are C, C++, and Go.

Container

A virtualized operating system environment that includes your application and its dependencies, allowing you to have a greater level of confidence that it will run no matter where it's deployed.

Continuous Delivery

A philosophy that your software updates should be continuously delivered to the target, although deployment to the user is still triggered manually, allowing you to deploy quickly and often. Quality gates like testing are performed automatically. Continuous Delivery requires Continuous Integration.

Continuous Deployment

Like Continuous Delivery, a philosophy that your software updates should be continuously delivered to the target. However, Continuous Deployment goes one step further and says that your updates should be automatically deployed without human interference as well. Also requires Continuous Integration.

Continuous Integration

Enabled by a Continuous Integration tool like CircleCI, merging all developers’ working codebase with the source, multiple times a day. Doing this requires a series of automated build and unit tests to ensure none of the proposed changes cause problems, but the result is that bugs and integration issues are discovered much earlier in the development process. Ideally, a build is triggered with every single commit, so that failures are caught by the developer immediately and corrected.

Continuous Verification

Like Continuous Integration, this means merging all developers’ working codebase with source multiple times a day, and running a series of automated build and unit tests. However, it also includes testing infrastructure, applying policies, and spinning up and testing ephemeral environments.

Database Cache

A database cache is supplementary to your primary database and exists to radically speed up read access to frequently-queried data.

Dependency

Code, libraries, or tools that your application relies on to operate. May or may not be written by a third party.

DevOps

DevOps is the term for the union of the development team and the IT operations team, through the use of a specific set of practices and toolchains. Rather than having the development and operations team handle their own specific responsibilities independently of one another, the two teams should work together. This is both a cultural change and a technology change, with the ultimate goal of drastically shortening the amount of time it takes the team to deliver software. The result is more frequent software deployments, deploying bad updates less frequently, and being able to recover from bad updates faster. CI/CD is a core concept of DevOps.

Docker

A virtualization tool that allows you to deliver your software in a particular type of package called a container, which includes an operating system.

Elastic Container Service

AWS ECS is a managed container orchestration tool that allows for the deployment and automated management of containerized applications.

Elastic Kubernetes Service

AWS EKS is a managed Kubernetes service that allows you to run your containerized workloads on Kubernetes without the overhead of managing it yourself.

Fargate

AWS Fargate is a serverless compute product from AWS, designed for use with containerized workloads.

Google Kubernetes Engine

GKE is a managed container orchestration tool on Google Cloud that allows for the deployment and automated management of containerized applications.

Helm

A package manager for Kubernetes. Written in YAML, a Helm chart allows you to define, install, and upgrade complex Kubernetes applications.

Infrastructure as Code

A tool that allows you to manage and provision infrastructure such as containers and network configuration through your code, in a way that can be versioned just like your code, rather than handling your infrastructure separately through an interactive tool or dashboard. Pulumi is an Infrastructure as Code tool.

Integration Tests

A type of testing that verifies entire parts of an application work when combined with other parts of an application.

Interpreter

A tool that translates source code in a higher-level language into a lower-level language for execution, line-by-line, at runtime. JavaScript, Lisp, and Ruby are examples of interpreted languages. Technically, Python is compiled to bytecode before being interpreted by CPython.

Kubernetes

A container orchestration tool designed to make the deployment and management of containerized applications easier. Think of it like the thing that helps you define which shipping containers go where on a barge.

Managed Kubernetes Service

A managed Kubernetes service is a Kubernetes platform where some or all of the responsibility for setup and maintenance lies with a third-party provider.

Microservice

A software development architecture that breaks your application up into multiple independent services that interact with one another. Each service performs a specific task, and may have its own resources such as a database.

Monolith

A software development architecture wherein your application is built as a single unit -- front-end, back-end, and database. Until fairly recently, this is how all software was written.

NoSQL

NoSQL is a type of database that organizes data into some data structure other than the two-dimensional tables seen in relational databases.

Policy as Code

Allows you to define and enforce business and security policies for your application through the use of a programming language, similar to Infrastructure as Code.

Relational Database

A type of database that stores its data organized into tables, made up of columns and rows. Commonly, multiple tables are involved, each containing data of a specific category (e.g., a table of users and a table of books), with primary and foreign keys for each entry being used to describe the relationship between entries (which books a user owns, for example). An example of a relational database is PostgreSQL.

SDLC

Often-used shorthand for Software Development Lifecycle, which is the processes and tools involved in writing and delivering software.

Serverless

A cloud computing model in which resources are allocated to an application on an as-needed basis, rather than the "always on" model of more classic cloud computing. Users do not need configure or maintain the servers their applications are running on, and billing is typically based exclusively on the resources consumed by the application while it is in use.

Service Mesh

A tool that makes it easier to monitor and control the flow of information between the microservices that make up your application. This is part of your infrastructure. Istio is an example of a service mesh.

SLO

A part of a Service Level Agreement that defines measurable characteristics for the performance of the service provider, such as incident response time, availability, and support response time.

Source Control

A tool that helps manage your uncompiled source code into repositories. Examples are GitHub or GitLab.

Unit Tests

A type of test that aims to verify functionality within a very specific, narrow scope, e.g., a specific function or class.

YAML

A data serialization language designed to be human-readable, frequently used for configuration files in DevOps and beyond.

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