|
Term/Acronym |
Description |
|
|
|
|
*aaS |
Everything as a Service (an even dumber way of abbreviating this one) |
|
ACS |
Access Control Service (part of the AppFabric) |
|
AppFabric (formerly .NET Services) |
Includes: Service Bus Service, Access Control Service. Those services essential to piecing together an Azure application. |
|
Azure Storage Services |
Provides persistent and scalable storage to the Azure OS. These services include Blob, Table and Queue. |
|
BigTable |
A database which Google uses which is very fast, scalable and resilient to failure. |
|
Blob Service |
Azure storage service responsible for persisting Binary Large Objects (or blobs). Individual blobs cannot exceed 50GB in size. |
|
CaaS |
Communications as a Service |
|
Claim(s) |
Explained best here http://blogs.msdn.com/vbertocci/archive/2008/05/05/claim-types-a-coarse-taxonomy.aspx |
|
Claims Transformation |
ACS supports rules which supports claims transformation. |
|
CRM |
Customer Relationship Management |
|
DaaS |
Data (storage) as a Service |
|
DF Development Fabric |
Azure fabric (simulation) runs on a user’s machine for development |
|
DS Development Storage |
Azure storage (simulation) runs on a user’s machine for development- utilizes SQL Express or SQL Server |
|
EAV |
Entity Attribute Value |
|
EBS |
Elastic Block Storage |
|
EC2 |
Elastic Compute Cloud – Amazon’s cloud computing platform based on renting virtual machine instances. |
|
EDI |
Electronic Data Interchange |
|
Elastic Block Store |
The database technology offered by Amazon’s EC2. |
|
FaaS |
File (storage) as a Service – hierarchical file storage system requiring MIME encoding of data. |
|
Fabric Agent |
Azure OS software component that executes on a physical/virtual machine reporting health and accepting OS control commands. |
|
Fault Domain |
A single point failure can lead to these Azure cloud resources to become unavailable. |
|
FC |
Fabric Controller |
|
IaaS |
Infrastructure as a Service |
|
Identity Federation |
Enables users of one domain to securely access data or systems of another domain. |
|
ITL |
Information Technology Laboratory |
|
LB |
Load Balancer |
|
MaaS |
Messaging as a Service |
|
MIME |
Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension – a |
|
NAT |
Network Address Translation |
|
NIST |
National Institute of Standards and Technology |
|
PaaS |
Platform as a Service |
|
Queue Service |
Azure storage service responsible for communicating between parts of an Azure application. (think “store-and-forward”) |
|
RDBMS |
Relational Database Management System |
|
REST |
Representational State Transfer |
|
S+S |
Software + Services |
|
S3 |
Simple Storage Service – Amazon’s storage service. |
|
SaaS |
Software as a Service |
|
SB |
Service Bus (part of the AppFabric) |
|
Service Bus |
Connects Azure services and clients together |
|
Service Definition (File) |
The service definition file (in conjunction with declarative program attributes) define the Azure application’s service model. |
|
Service Model |
An Azure application is deployed according to a Service Model. This model defines the update and fault domains as well as the privileges and ports that services can access. |
|
SLA |
Service Level Agreement |
|
SMBs |
Small and Medium sized Businesses |
|
SOA |
Service-Oriented Architecture – A software system solution typically composed of web-services. |
|
SQL Services |
A cloud-based implementation of Microsoft SQL Server. |
|
TaaS |
Technology as a Service (apparently anything can be ‘as a Service’) |
|
Table Service |
Azure storage service that is responsible for storing entities. Each entity is composed of properties of common types (i.e. bool, int, etc.) which can change over time. An entity cannot exceed 1MB in size. |
|
Token |
Associated with credentials issued by ACS |
|
T-SQL |
Transact-SQL (Structured Query Language) |
|
UCI |
Unified Cloud Interface |
|
Update Domain |
Azure cloud resources that can be temporarily taken offline and updated. |
|
URI |
Uniform Resource Identifier |
|
VIPs |
Virtual IPs (address) |
|
VM |
Virtual Machine – A software implementation of a computer. Azure uses Microsoft’s Virtual PC while other cloud OS’s may rely on VMWare’s implementation. |
|
WCF |
Windows Communication Foundation |
|
Web Role |
An Azure service that user’s can connect to. |
|
WF |
Windows Workflow Foundation |
|
Windows Azure |
Microsoft’s cloud-based operating system. |
|
Windows Live ID |
Previously known as Windows Passport |
|
Windows Server AppFabric |
Currently in Beta, provides a mechanism to run ‘a cloud’ on Windows Server 2008 |
|
Worker Role |
An Azure service that user’s cannot connect to. |
|
Xaas |
Everything as a Service |