Cloud Fundamentals
Core concepts behind cloud computing and service models.
14 terms
The terms here are the load-bearing vocabulary of cloud computing: the service models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS), the shared-responsibility line between what your provider secures and what you do, and the deployment patterns — blue-green, canary, rolling — that let you ship changes without downtime. Get these wrong and every more specific term downstream (a VPC, an IAM role, a Lambda function) gets harder to reason about, because you're missing the frame they fit into.
Most of these concepts are provider-agnostic even though the concrete services (EC2, Compute Engine, Azure VMs) aren't — the pattern of 'provision compute, pay for what you use, scale it up or down' is the same idea wearing three different vendor labels. Start here if you're new to cloud infrastructure generally, before going deep on any one provider's specifics.
- ActiveMQ
The veteran JMS message broker — protocol-polyglot, deeply embedded in Java estates, and the 'Classic vs Artemis' fork every operator must understand.
- Amazon Resource Name (ARN)
Amazon Resource Names — the globally unique addressing scheme for every AWS resource, and the string format that IAM policies are actually written against.
- AWS Config
An AWS service that continuously records your resource configurations and evaluates them against rules — answering 'what changed, when, and is it compliant?' for audit and drift detection.
- AWS Organizations
AWS's service for managing many accounts as one org — consolidated billing plus guardrails (SCPs) that cap what accounts can do. The foundation of a multi-account strategy.
- Control Tower
AWS's managed multi-account landing zone: automated account creation with guardrails, centralized logging, and organization-wide policy from day one.
- Event Sourcing
Storing state as an immutable log of events rather than current values — a perfect audit trail and time machine, bought with real complexity most systems don't need.
- Event-Driven Architecture
Systems that communicate by emitting and reacting to events rather than calling each other directly — loose coupling and scale, bought with eventual consistency and debugging difficulty.
- Exponential Backoff
The retry discipline that prevents failed calls from becoming outages: wait longer after each failure, add randomness, and give up on purpose.
- FinOps
The discipline of making cloud spend an engineering metric — visibility, accountability, and optimization as a continuous loop, not a quarterly panic.
- Jitter
Deliberate randomness added to timing — retries, cron schedules, cache TTLs — to break the synchronization that turns many well-behaved clients into an accidental DDoS.
- Landing Zone
A pre-configured, secure, multi-account cloud foundation set up before you deploy workloads — accounts, networking, identity, logging, and guardrails done right from the start so you don't retrofit governance later.
- Message Queue
An asynchronous buffer between services: producers enqueue work, consumers process at their own pace — decoupling that turns traffic spikes into backlogs instead of outages.
- Pilot Light DR
A disaster recovery strategy keeping critical data replicated while compute resources remain inactive until failover.
- Warm Standby DR
A disaster recovery pattern maintaining replicated data and minimally scaled compute resources for fast failover.