Phase 7: Glossary

ACID: (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) A set of properties of database transactions intended to guarantee data validity despite errors.
Application Gateway: An Azure service that provides application-level (Layer 7) load balancing and web application firewall (WAF) capabilities.
Application Insights: A feature of Azure Monitor, it's an extensible Application Performance Management (APM) service for developers and DevOps professionals.
ARM Templates: (Azure Resource Manager templates) JSON files that define the infrastructure and configuration for your project in a declarative syntax.
Attack Surface: The sum of the different points (the "attack vectors") where an unauthorized user (the "attacker") can try to enter data to or extract data from an environment.
Autoscaling: The process of dynamically allocating compute resources to a workload based on its need.
Availability Set: A logical grouping of VMs within a datacenter that allows Azure to understand how your application is built to provide for redundancy and availability.
Availability Zone (AZ): A unique physical location within an Azure region, made up of one or more datacenters with independent power, cooling, and networking.
Azure Active Directory (Azure AD): Microsoft’s cloud-based identity and access management service.
Azure AD B2B: (Business-to-Business) A feature within Azure AD that lets you invite guest users to collaborate with your organization.
Azure AD B2C: (Business-to-Consumer) A separate service from Azure AD that provides business-to-consumer identity as a service.
Azure AD Connect: A Microsoft tool designed to meet and accomplish your hybrid identity goals, synchronizing on-premises directories with Azure AD.
Azure AD Privileged Identity Management (PIM): A service in Azure AD that enables you to manage, control, and monitor access to important resources in your organization.
Azure App Service: A fully managed platform for building, deploying, and scaling web apps and APIs.
Azure Automation: An Azure service for simplifying cloud management with process automation.
Azure Backup: The Azure-based service you can use to back up and restore your data in the Microsoft cloud.
Azure Blueprints: A service that helps you orchestrate and deploy a repeatable set of Azure resources that adhere to an organization's standards, patterns, and requirements.
Azure CDN: (Content Delivery Network) A global CDN solution for delivering high-bandwidth content.
Azure Cosmos DB: A globally distributed, multi-model database service from Microsoft for managing data at planet-scale.
Azure Cost Management: A suite of tools that helps you analyze, manage, and optimize your Azure costs.
Azure Data Factory: A managed cloud service that's built for complex hybrid extract-transform-load (ETL), extract-load-transform (ELT), and data integration projects.
Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2: A set of capabilities dedicated to big data analytics, built on Azure Blob Storage.
Azure Database Migration Service (DMS): A fully managed service designed to enable seamless migrations from multiple database sources to Azure Data platforms with minimal downtime.
Azure DNS: A hosting service for DNS domains that provides name resolution by using Microsoft Azure infrastructure.
Azure Event Hubs: A big data streaming platform and event ingestion service.
Azure ExpressRoute: A service that lets you create private connections between Azure datacenters and infrastructure on your premises or in a colocation environment.
Azure Firewall: A managed, cloud-based network security service that protects your Azure Virtual Network resources.
Azure Functions: A serverless compute service that lets you run event-triggered code without having to explicitly provision or manage infrastructure.
Azure Hybrid Benefit: A licensing benefit that helps you to significantly reduce the costs of running your workloads in the cloud.
Azure IoT Hub: A managed service, hosted in the cloud, that acts as a central message hub for bi-directional communication between your IoT application and the devices it manages.
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS): A managed container orchestration service based on the open-source Kubernetes system.
Azure Load Balancer: A Layer 4 (TCP, UDP) load balancer that provides high availability by distributing incoming traffic among healthy service instances.
Azure Logic Apps: A cloud service that helps you schedule, automate, and orchestrate tasks, business processes, and workflows.
Azure Migrate: A service that helps you migrate from on-premises to Azure.
Azure Monitor: A comprehensive solution for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry from your cloud and on-premises environments.
Azure Policy: A service in Azure that you use to create, assign, and manage policies. These policies enforce different rules and effects over your resources.
Azure Private Link: Enables you to access Azure PaaS Services (for example, Azure Storage and SQL Database) and Azure hosted customer-owned/partner services over a private endpoint in your virtual network.
Azure Site Recovery (ASR): An Azure service that helps ensure business continuity by keeping business apps and workloads running during outages.
Azure SQL Database: A fully managed platform as a service (PaaS) database engine that handles most of the database management functions such as upgrading, patching, backups, and monitoring.
Azure Synapse Analytics: An analytics service that brings together enterprise data warehousing and Big Data analytics.
Azure Traffic Manager: A DNS-based traffic load balancer that enables you to distribute traffic optimally to services across global Azure regions.
Azure Virtual Network (VNet): The fundamental building block for your private network in Azure.
Azure VPN Gateway: A specific type of virtual network gateway that is used to send encrypted traffic between an Azure virtual network and an on-premises location over the public Internet.
Bicep: A domain-specific language (DSL) that uses declarative syntax to deploy Azure resources.
Blast Radius: The potential impact or damage that a failure or security breach of a component could have on the rest of the system.
CAP Theorem: A theorem stating that a distributed data store cannot simultaneously provide more than two out of three guarantees: Consistency, Availability, and Partition tolerance.
CI/CD: (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment/Delivery) The practice of automating the software development lifecycle to deliver code changes more frequently and reliably.
CIDR: (Classless Inter-Domain Routing) A method for allocating IP addresses and routing IP packets.
Cold Start: The latency that occurs the first time a serverless function is invoked after a period of inactivity.
Conditional Access: A feature of Azure AD that provides granular access control policies based on specific conditions.
Configuration Drift: The state where the actual configuration of an environment has diverged from the intended, code-defined configuration.
Data Migration Assistant (DMA): A tool from Microsoft that helps you upgrade to a modern data platform by detecting compatibility issues that can impact database functionality in your new version of SQL Server or Azure SQL Database.
Defense in Depth: A security strategy that uses multiple layers of security controls to protect a system.
Denormalization: The process of trying to improve the read performance of a database, at the expense of losing some write performance, by adding redundant copies of data or by grouping data.
DevOps: A set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops).
Disaster Recovery (DR): A set of policies, tools, and procedures to enable the recovery or continuation of vital technology infrastructure and systems following a natural or human-induced disaster.
DTU: (Database Transaction Unit) A blended measure of CPU, memory, and I/O in Azure SQL Database.
ETL/ELT: (Extract, Transform, Load / Extract, Load, Transform) Processes for moving data from a source to a target system.
Failback: The process of restoring operations to a primary system after they have been shifted to a secondary system during a failover.
Failover: The process of switching to a redundant or standby system upon the failure or abnormal termination of the previously active system.
Fault Domain: A group of underlying hardware that share a common power source and network switch. In Azure, VMs in an Availability Set are spread across multiple fault domains.
FQDN: (Fully Qualified Domain Name) The complete domain name for a specific computer, or host, on the internet.
GDPR: (General Data Protection Regulation) A regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy.
Geo-replication: The process of replicating data to a secondary geographic region for disaster recovery.
GRS/RA-GRS: (Geo-Redundant Storage / Read-Access Geo-Redundant Storage) Azure Storage redundancy options that replicate data to a secondary region.
HDFS: (Hadoop Distributed File System) A distributed file system designed to run on commodity hardware.
High Availability (HA): The ability of a system to remain operational and perform its intended function correctly and consistently when it's expected to, despite component failures.
HIPAA: (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) A US federal law that required the creation of national standards to protect sensitive patient health information.
Hot Partition: In distributed databases, a partition that receives a disproportionately high volume of read or write requests, leading to performance bottlenecks.
Hybrid Identity: A user identity that is created in an on-premises Active Directory and synchronized to a cloud directory like Azure AD.
IaaS: (Infrastructure as a Service) A cloud computing model where a vendor provides users access to computing resources such as servers, storage, and networking.
Idempotence: The property of certain operations in mathematics and computer science that can be applied multiple times without changing the result beyond the initial application.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC): The process of managing and provisioning computer data centers through machine-readable definition files.
Integration Runtime: The compute infrastructure used by Azure Data Factory to provide data integration capabilities across different network environments.
Just-Enough-Access (JEA): A security principle that restricts permissions to only what is necessary for a specific task.
Just-In-Time (JIT) Access: A security practice that grants temporary privileged access for a defined period, automatically revoking it afterward.
KQL: (Kusto Query Language) The language used to query data in Azure Log Analytics, Azure Data Explorer, and other services.
Kubernetes: An open-source container orchestration system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
Least Privilege: A security principle that states that a user or process should be given only the minimum necessary access rights to perform its job.
Lift-and-Shift: (Rehost) An application migration strategy that involves moving an application as-is from an on-premises environment to the cloud.
LRS: (Locally Redundant Storage) An Azure Storage redundancy option that replicates data within a single datacenter.
Managed Identity: An identity in Azure AD that is automatically managed by Azure.
Management Group: A container that helps you manage access, policy, and compliance for multiple Azure subscriptions.
Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR): The average time it takes to resolve a failure after it is detected.
MFA: (Multi-Factor Authentication) A security process that requires more than one method of authentication from independent categories of credentials to verify the user's identity.
Microservices: An architectural style that structures an application as a collection of loosely coupled, independently deployable services.
MPP: (Massive Parallel Processing) A type of computing that uses many separate CPUs running in parallel to execute a single program.
Network Interface (NIC): A virtual network card that enables an Azure Virtual Machine to communicate with the internet, Azure, and on-premises resources.
Network Security Group (NSG): A stateful firewall that filters network traffic to and from Azure resources in an Azure virtual network.
Network Virtual Appliance (NVA): A virtual appliance that can be used to enhance network functionality, such as a firewall or a load balancer.
NoSQL: (Not only SQL) A class of non-relational databases that provide a mechanism for storage and retrieval of data that is modeled in means other than the tabular relations.
OWASP Top 10: A standard awareness document for developers and web application security, representing a broad consensus about the most critical security risks to web applications.
PaaS: (Platform as a Service) A cloud computing model where a third-party provider delivers hardware and software tools to users over the internet.
Partition Key: In NoSQL databases like Cosmos DB, the attribute that determines the logical and physical partitions where data is stored.
PCI DSS: (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) An information security standard for organizations that handle branded credit cards.
Polyglot Persistence: The concept of using multiple data storage technologies for varying data storage needs within a single application.
POSIX: (Portable Operating System Interface) A family of standards specified by the IEEE for maintaining compatibility between operating systems.
Private Endpoint: A network interface that connects you privately and securely to a service powered by Azure Private Link.
RBAC: (Role-Based Access Control) A method of restricting network access based on the roles of individual users within an enterprise.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO): The maximum acceptable amount of data loss after an unplanned incident, measured in time.
Recovery Services Vault: A storage entity in Azure that houses data. The data is typically copies of data, or configuration information for virtual machines (VMs), workloads, servers, or workstations.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO): The maximum acceptable amount of time a system can be down after a failure or disaster occurs.
Reserved Instances (RIs): A purchasing option that provides a discounted hourly rate for specific Azure resources in exchange for a 1- or 3-year commitment.
Resource Group: A container that holds related resources for an Azure solution.
Right-Sizing: The process of continuously evaluating resource sizes to ensure they are appropriately matched to workload requirements.
SaaS: (Software as a Service) A software distribution model in which a third-party provider hosts application and makes them available to customers over the Internet.
Savings Plans: A flexible pricing model that offers significant discounts on compute usage in exchange for a 1- or 3-year commitment.
Service Principal: An identity created for use with applications, hosted services, and automated tools to access Azure resources.
Shared Access Signature (SAS): A URI that grants restricted access rights to Azure Storage resources.
Shared Responsibility Model: A framework that outlines what Microsoft is responsible for (security of the cloud) and what the customer is responsible for (security in the cloud).
Single Point of Failure (SPOF): A part of a system that, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working.
Spot Instances: An Azure purchasing option that allows you to use unused Azure capacity at significant discounts.
Stateless: An application or process that does not save client data generated in one session for use in the next session with that client.
Subscription: A logical container for your Azure services and a billing unit.
Tag: A label that you apply to an Azure resource.
Terraform: An open-source infrastructure as code software tool that enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure.
Transparent Data Encryption (TDE): A technology that encrypts SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, and Azure Synapse Analytics data files.
Update Domain: A group of VMs and underlying physical hardware that can be rebooted at the same time. In Azure, VMs in an Availability Set are spread across multiple update domains.
User Defined Routes (UDRs): Custom routes in Azure that override Azure's default system routes.
vCore: (Virtual Core) A purchasing model for Azure SQL Database that lets you choose the number of vCores, the amount of memory, and the amount and speed of storage.
Version Control: The practice of tracking and managing changes to software code.
Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS): An Azure compute resource that you can use to deploy and manage a set of identical VMs.
WORM: (Write Once, Read Many) A data storage technology that allows data to be written a single time and prevents the data from being erased or modified.
ZRS: (Zone-Redundant Storage) An Azure Storage redundancy option that replicates data across three Azure availability zones in the primary region.