Public Cloud Terminology

Question 1

AWS services are housed within an Account. Accounts can be Master Payer accounts which contain billing data or Linked Accounts which do not. AWS Organizations and other services can be used to manage Accounts within AWS. Many AWS services can span Account boundaries.

Answer 1

Account (AWS)

(Public Cloud Terminology)

Question 2

All Upfront Reserved Instance, Partial Upfront Reserved Instance and No Upfront Reserved Instance. Some people use these acronyms when referring to reserved instances, in case you hear them.

Answer 2

AURI, PURI, NURI (AWS mostly)

(Public Cloud Terminology)

Question 3

sub-unit of a Region, there are typically multiple AZs per Region. An AZ is made up of multiple physical data centers but can generally be thought of as being very closely situated from a network latency and performance perspective. Terminology varies among CSPs.

Answer 3

Availability Zone, AZ (AWS)

(Public Cloud Terminology)

Question 4

AWS provides it on its invoice showing the effective rate for a group of resources with the same attributes where some of the resources are receiving a discount from reservations and some are not. This can help to eliminate the effects of reservations applying randomly to resources in multiple linked accounts, by providing a consistent rate for specific resources that would have been eligible to be covered by the reservation or savings plan.

Answer 4

Blended Rate

(Public Cloud Terminology)

Question 5

Azure’s object storage solution

Answer 5

Blob Storage (Azure)

(Public Cloud Terminology)

Question 6

GCP’s object storage solution

Answer 6

Cloud Storage Buckets (GCP)

(Public Cloud Terminology)

Question 7

Azure’s virtual compute cloud offering

Answer 7

Compute (Azure)

(Public Cloud Terminology)

Question 8

GCP’s virtual compute cloud offering

Answer 8

Compute Engine (GCP)

(Public Cloud Terminology)

Question 9

Accessing cloud resources is done through types of online site provided by each CSP. Azure calls theirs the Azure Portal (Subscription Portal, Enrollment Portal, etc.), AWS calls theirs the AWS Console, and GCP calls theirs the GCP Dashboard

Answer 9

Console, Dashboard, Portal

(Public Cloud Terminology)

Question 10

AWS terms referring to the ability to convert RIs for some resources to different specifications. Standard RIs cannot be converted or changed for their entire term. Convertibility reduces the discount offered by AWS. Azure and GCP also allow some flexibility in specific ways to their reservations using slightly different language

Answer 10

Convertible / Standard

(Public Cloud Terminology)

Question 11

Elastic Compute Cloud - AWS’ virtual compute cloud offering

Answer 11

EC2 (AWS)

(Public Cloud Terminology)

Question 12

When a customer has an Enterprise Agreement (EA) with Microsoft, they use an enrollment level portal to access all of their Microsoft licenses and high-level billing information, including for Azure use. Companies with an Enrollment manage this for themselves, and create Subscriptions, an analog to AWS Accounts or GCP Projects, underneath the Enrollment. Companies who buy Azure through a CSP Reseller receive their Subscriptions, but the reseller owns and controls the Enrollment level portal and information.

Answer 12

Enrollment (Azure)

(Public Cloud Terminology)

Question 13

Identity and Access Management - helpfully the way that all three cloud providers refer to their system of granting and governing permissions within their cloud platforms

Answer 13

IAM (AWS and GCP)

(Public Cloud Terminology)

Question 14

Instance is usually AWS specific and generally refers to a specific EC2 virtual machine. AWS supports a variety of instance families, designated by letter, an instance Generation designated by a number and optionally other letters, and instance sizes which follow a structure of nano, micro, small, medium, large, xlarge, 2xlarge, etc. The Instance type includes the entire designation, such as m5a.16xlarge which would be an “m” family, 5th generation, “a” for AMD chipset, 16xlarge sized instance. Azure also has virtual machines which they call VMs which have families, generation and size designators. GCP calls these machine types and has a more flexible size designation scheme.

Answer 14

Instance Type, Family, Generation, Size (AWS)

(Public Cloud Terminology)

Question 15

Tags are metadata attached to a specific instance, bucket, resource group, account or other resource running in a cloud environment. AWS and Azure refer to these as Tags, while GCP refers to them as Labels. They are meant to provide contextual information about the resource. Tags can be created with the resource in most cases or added after the fact manually or systematically. Tags are useful for identifying the type of resource, the environment it supports (Dev, Prod, Test, etc.) the owner, the cost center, the operational parameters, etc. Tags can be queried or accessed in a wide variety of ways and can be used to drive automation, divide costs, or for other important purposes. Most large cloud-using organizations will at some point establish governance policies around tag use and require specific tags be used on all resources.

Answer 15

Metadata, Tags, Labels

(Public Cloud Terminology)

Question 16

many CSPs offer compute instances/VMs that can be created and used at deeply discounted rates from traditional on demand compute VMs; however, in exchange for the discounted costs, a characteristic of these VMs is that if the cloud provider requires access to the resources being used by preemptible VMs, they will stop those instances. Examples of terms used to describe preemptible compute instances/VMs include:

GCP Preemptible Compute Engine VM
AWS Spot instance
Azure Spot instance

Answer 16

Preemptible Instances/VMs

(Public Cloud Terminology)

Question 17

GCP services are housed within…

Answer 17

Project (GCP)

(Public Cloud Terminology)

Question 18

GCP organizational resource hierarchy element. A Folder can contain one or more GCP Projects, and/or other GCP Folders. Folders exist within the context of one Billing Account.

Answer 18

Folder (GCP)

(Public Cloud Terminology)

Question 19

A discrete geographic area made up of smaller units which in most cloud provider parlance can be thought of as one contiguous “data center” from a network latency, pricing, and service availability perspective. Generally, data transfer within one is free, services are consistent within the region. Terminology varies among the various CSPs. They are generally guaranteed to be more than a minimum distance from one another to satisfy disaster recovery requirements.

Answer 19

Region

(Public Cloud Terminology)

Question 20

A general name for a virtual cloud service or services.

Answer 20

Resource

(Public Cloud Terminology)

Question 21

Azure services are additionally required to exist within one, which is treated with permissions and policies, tagged, etc. affecting all resources within it. Also referred to as RGs, oftentimes serve the same function as AWS Accounts in terms of serving as a logical separation of applications, environments, billing responsibility or RGs

Answer 21

Resource Group (Azure)

(Public Cloud Terminology)

Question 22

a commitment to use a cloud resource, usually of a specific type, location and size, for some period of time, usually 1 or 3 years, in exchange for a discounted rate.

Answer 22

RI - Reserved Instance

(Public Cloud Terminology)

Question 23

Simple Storage Service - AWS’ object storage solution

Answer 23

S3 (AWS)

(Public Cloud Terminology)

Question 24

Azure services are housed within this, which are roughly analogous to AWS Linked Accounts. They typically roll up billing data to an Enrollment or Contract level which serves as the Master Payer analog to AWS. An organization might own its own Enrollment, or might purchase them from a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) reseller who owns the Enrollment.

Answer 24

Subscription (Azure)

(Public Cloud Terminology)

Question 25

AWS provides in its CUR file, this data which are the actual costs being charged for each resource or portion of resource usage for the billing period as affected by any reservation or savings plan, but not including any negotiated credits. This cost may fluctuate as reservations or savings plans are applied to different resources in different time periods. So the cost of one EC2 instance, for example, for the same number of hours may have a different unblended rate or cost.

Answer 25

Unblended Rates/Cost

(Public Cloud Terminology)