Taos Glossary

An explanation of industry terms that is a quick read, and knowledge base.

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Ansible

Red Hat’s Ansible Automation Platform was developed to help organizations build and manage automation elements across their operational processes. It provides a comprehensive foundation for implementing enterprise-wide automation for workflows such as cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many others.

Application Modernization

Application modernization is the process of porting, converting, or otherwise rewriting an existing application, transforming it to take advantage of new technologies and functionality that better align with modern business opportunities.

Bastion

Also called bastion servers, a bastion host is a network server specially designed and configured to withstand cybersecurity attacks. The point of a bastion host is to give users access to a private network from external networks. As an externally positioned, security-dedicated server, a bastion host provides authorized users with access to the private network and acts as the only access path to those internal network resources.

Cloud Migration

Cloud migration is the process of relocating an organization’s on-premises data, applications, and IT processes into a cloud or from one cloud to another. Cloud migrations are often driven by inefficient hardware, aging infrastructure, and legacy systems that are costly to maintain, challenging to configure for the best performance, and difficult to secure for privacy and resiliency.

Data Processing Unit (DPU)

A data processing unit (DPU) is a programmable processor that offloads networking and communication tasks from the CPU, providing more efficient storage and reduced demand on processing resources required for other tasks.

DevOps

DevOps is a software delivery model aimed at promoting collaboration between the product engineering and IT operations teams to function at peak performance, thereby increasing their ability to release products and services at high velocity with as little friction and latency as possible. Organizations adopting DevOps have been found to deploy code 30x more frequently with 50% fewer failures.

DevSecOps

Defined in connection with the DevOps model, DevSecOps is both a model and a cultural movement that aims to bake security directly into the application development process, shifting the security requirements of a solution “left” (closer to the beginning) in the software development lifecycle.

Enclave

A network enclave (also known as a security enclave) is a portion or segment of an internal network that operates separately from the rest of an organization’s digital infrastructure. It shares a singular, unified security perimeter, with access defined by common policies managed and enforced through firewalls and VPNs. The primary purpose of an enclave is to extend beyond traditional network security options to protect business-critical devices and sensitive data sets on a deeper level.

FinOps

FinOps is a cultural shift within an organization where accountability is established over cloud management to optimize value. FinOps incorporates teams across finance, technology, engineering, and business to collaborate on ways to balance speed, cost, and quality of cloud-based operations and cloud cost. Everyone within the organization takes ownership of mutual cloud usage and pursuits best practices to establish financial control and predictability.

GPU-CUDA

CUDA was established in 2006 by Nvidia as a parallel computing platform and programming model that would provide computing capabilities based on graphics processing units (also known as GPUs). To date, it has more than 20 million downloads and helps developers speed up application performance through GPU acceleration. CUDA has seen wide adoption across consumer and industrial sectors and is commonly used for high-performance computing and research applications.

Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid cloud solution combines a private cloud with at least one or multiple public clouds, with data orchestrated between the private and public services via proprietary software or third-party solutions. Hybrid clouds integrate on-premises infrastructure cloud-based services, facilitating management and data portability between the different systems.

Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU)

An infrastructure processing unit (IPU) is a programmable networking device explicitly designed to reduce processing overhead and free up CPU performance for other computing tasks. Resources are made available to users via a programmable and scalable service that balances storage and enables finely-tuned processing.

JSON Web Token (JWT)

A commonly used method for securing data exchange is called the JSON Web Token (JWT), or a JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) object. As a JWT is virtually signed with a public/private key pair or by using a secret, this transferred information is verifiable and trusted.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open-source system for orchestrating the scale, deployment, and management of containerized workloads and services. Kubernetes, which is both portable and extensible, automates many manual processes required for the scalable deployment and management of containerized applications.

Load Balancing

Load balancing for the cloud is defined as distributing workloads and compute properties in a cloud computing environment to allocate network traffic requests equally across the systems requesting and accessing those resources. Cloud load balancing aims to achieve greater efficiency and reliability for cloud-based apps and across cloud operations. Cloud load balancing lets organizations host the distribution of resources between multiple computers, servers, or networks to better support and manage user requests. This helps optimize an organization’s available resources to minimize the response time for applications and their users.

Multi Cloud

Multi-cloud operations materialize when an organization engages a variety of cloud solutions such as public cloud, hybrid cloud, on-premises IT infrastructure, and edge computing. Multiple cloud computing and storage services are involved in a single network architecture for one organization.

NoOps

“No Operations” (NoOps) is a relatively new concept in data management and network oversight. It is the idea that an IT environment can be so automated and removed from the underlying infrastructure that there’s zero need for a team to handle software in-house. In other words, it aims to completely automate the deploying, monitoring, and improving software operations.

Observability

In IT and cloud spheres, observability is the ability to proactively collect and measure intelligence concerning a system’s internal state through its outputs. If a system is “observable,” then its current state can be accurately determined by assessing its metrics, events, logs, and traces—a collection of sensor data.

Private Cloud

Establishing a private cloud means an organization engages a cloud computing infrastructure that is solely dedicated to company usage. A private cloud can be based on a company’s own data center, a colocation facility hosted by third-party vendors, or through a private cloud provider.

Pub/Sub

Publish/subscribe messaging (pub/sub) is a communication service that sends content in a serverless environment. When a message is sent through a pub/sub service, it’s received immediately by all subscribers to the related topic.

Public Cloud

Public cloud computing is the infrastructure that’s available and accessible to all users in a national region or globally. It is most often owned and managed by third-party providers. Public clouds give users remote access to enterprise-grade operational processing and storage.

SaaS

Software as a service (SaaS) provides applications via the Internet instead of a business installing and maintaining software on its own. With SaaS, organizations can access the necessary software online, which helps to free them from complex and costly software and hardware management. SaaS applications are also labeled “Web-based software,” or known as on-demand software and hosted software.

Terraform

Terraform is an infrastructure-as-code, open-source software tool that lets developers and IT teams build, change, and iterate resources safely and efficiently, whether in the cloud or on-premises. Terraform codifies cloud APIs into declarative configuration files and enables a consistent CLI workflow to manage hundreds of cloud services across an organization’s data infrastructure.

Zero Trust

As a security framework, the zero trust methodology requires all users, both within and outside a specific network, to be authorized and validated on an ongoing, per-use basis for security configuration and posture before being allowed to access in-network applications and data. A zero trust approach is a framework for securing infrastructure and data by assuming that there is no traditional network edge and that no entity attempting to gain access can be trusted by default.