Hello, nice to meet you. Do you speak Azure?
This is a living reference post that explains various cloud and Azure specific terminology in simple terms.
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing offers convenient models to access infrastructure, platform, and software offerings on a pay-as-you-go basis. This model helps with freeing up capital, streamlining IT maintenance, modernizing and scaling business approaches, building security and flexibility into services and solutions, and allowing faster adoption of ever-changing market conditions.
There is no cloud, it’s just someone else’s computer.
Cloud computing essentially means, that different types of services, ranging from computing and data storage to networking, software, and analytics, are performed in private or public cloud and delivered over the Internet.
Private Cloud
This model refers to cloud computing resources that are used exclusively by a single organization. This can be located in your on-premises data center or hosted by a service provider.
Public cloud
Public cloud means that all hardware, software, and supporting infrastructure is owned and managed by a cloud service provider, such as Microsoft. Customer doesn’t have physical access to any of the resources and everything is delivered over the Internet. Customers of public cloud can manage their resources through a web browser or a command line.
Hybrid cloud
A hybrid cloud model combines public and private clouds by connecting the infrastructure and applications between cloud-based resources and resources that are not located in the cloud. This approach gives greater flexibility and/or help with fulfilling compliance requirements.
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure is a public cloud computing platform offering from Microsoft. It is relying on more than 50 enterprise-grade multi-region data centers that are spread across the world and interconnected by private links. It offers IaaS, PaaS and SaaS services.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
Cloud Tenant
A tenant represents an entire organization in an Azure Active Directory service instance. These identities can be used to sing up for Microsoft cloud services, such as Azure, Microsoft Intune, or Office365, and Microsoft365.
Management Group
Management groups can be understood as containers that help you manage access, policy, and compliance across multiple subscriptions. This helps us built and efficient hierarchy for application of Azure Policies and Blueprints, or assignment of Azure Role-Based Access Controls. Management Groups are groups that contain subscriptions. Management group tree can support up to six levels of depth and it can have many children, but only one parent. Top management group in each tenant is called Root Management Group.
Azure Subscription
Azure subscription is a logical entity in which we can provision and consume Azure resources. Subscription acts as a barrier inside of which all of our resources are pooled together and it helps us divide the cost. Azure Subscription can be part of a single tenant and one parent management group. It can be a post-paid or pre-paid credit carrying subscription.
Enterprise agreement
For medium to large enterprises looking at making a pre-commit on the amount of Azure resource consumption. This is typically a Pre-Paid annual payment.
Open License Program
For small and medium organisations who would choose to use a Pay-As-You-Go model. Credits can be added through activation of open license key bought from Microsoft resellers. Also available through web direct options, purchased through Microsoft websites.
Microsoft Partners
For small and medium organizations who would choose to use a post-paid Pay-As-You-Go model. This is available through Cloud Solutions Providers – CSP Partners.
Pay-As-You-Go
For small and medium organizations. A payment method is registered in Azure portal and billed monthly.
Azure Resource Group
Resource Group is a container inside of Azure Subscription. It can be used to hold related resources for an Azure solution or for access delegation, or as a target scope. You decide how you want to allocate resources to resource groups based on what makes the most sense for your organization. The resource group stores metadata about the resources that are in it.
Azure Resource
Azure Resource is anything that can be provisioned and used in Azure. This can be a service in Azure Platform as a Service, or a Virtual Machine running in Azure Infrastrucutre as a Service. Anything we create and/or use is Azure Resource.
Azure Governance
Azure Governance is a set of tools and principles that allows us to enforce a set of rules on how resources in the cloud are configured. Such rules and policies help us prevent the creation of an uncontrolled environment and generating unexpected costs.
Azure Resource Explorer
Azure Resource Locks
Azure Tags
Azure Policy
Azure Blueprints
Static Website
A static website refers to a website that can be loaded and served to the end-user statically from a pre-defined set of static files. It can contain HTML, CSS and client-side JavaScript files, but there is no need for server-side web programming and databases.
Comparing to dynamic websites, static websites are harder to maintain and require a lot of manual work. Modern static site generators and template web systems are changing this and static websites can now be generated and created from dynamic content.