Terminology

Governance – policies and processes that govern responsible cloud and virtualization operations that can include the following: lease times and reclamation, idle and sprawl awareness, sizing limitations, chargeback, showback, catalog offerings, allowable menu actions, branding, capacity planning, procurement, SLA’s, performance analysis, and optimization.

Orchestration – the automation and integration of multiple datacenter services, web application program interfaces (API’s) and/or scripting languages to seamlessly consolidate various actions into a single action (a mouse click or keystroke).

Extensibility – the ability to extend an interface or web portal to integrate with other software that may be hosted in the same datacenter or another datacenter.

VM Sprawl – the leftover, oversized (horizontal) or idle (vertical) VMs that accumulate in a datacenter as a result of no applied governance to a virtualized environment.

Shadow IT – when employees turn to public cloud providers for quick IT resources on demand, even though their employer provides the service in their own virtualized datacenter. Usually a result of slow/unreliable delivery and billed back to the company as a departmental expense, not a budgeted IT expenditure.

Optimization – using the best possible configuration to achieve best performance and acceptable usage limits for any layer of technology after all considerations for security and compliance have been taken into account. This could include hardware, load balancers, virtual machines, operating systems, etc.

Chargeback – a billing system for cloud/virtualized environments, showing cost per resource unit, per time measurement. This can be “cost per VM, per day” or even “cost per GB” of storage.

Showback – showing the cost per resource to parts of the business without actually charging them, to give the business unit or consumer base a sense of accountability for usage.

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) – within Amazon Web Services (AWS), the logical object used to define and manage virtual resources.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – the first level of delivery when provisioning resources in a cloud, includes: Network, Compute, Storage, Operating Systems, Core Services, and any Day-One Operations.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) – the second level or phase of delivery when provisioning resources in a cloud, includes: Middleware Software, Application Stacks, Configurations, Scripts, Packages, Modules, and Code Deployment/Delivery.

Code Deployment/Delivery – the automated deployment of a version of developer’s code into a provisioning cloud, usually pulled from a central repository. Sometimes called Data as a Service (DaaS).

Anything as a Service (XaaS) – the dynamic delivery of any possible use case of Information Technology

Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) – a VMware term, describes the state of data center in the current market during the cloud era

DevOps – the merging of Development and Infrastructure Operations as a best practice for the business. Enables the rapid development of software while addressing the needs of general datacenter management. “DevOps integration targets product delivery, quality testing, feature development, and maintenance releases in order to improve reliability and security and provide faster development and deployment cycles” – Wikipedia

Posted in IT Infrastructure Transformation