Cloud Technical Glossary

Term	Description
APACHE	A software for running a webserver
CALM/Cloud account lifecycle management	Cloud lifecycle management
CEPH	Distributed data storage platform, our standard storage software on the cloud
CEPHFS/CEPH File System	CEPH storage that can be mounted for e.g. data sharing on multiple instances/VMs.
Compute Cloud	A flavour of instances/VMs which will be running for a limited time and may have high CPU/memory requirements during the entire lifespan.
CVMFS	A distributed read-only content distribution system, often used for managing software.
Dashboard	The web portal, named "Horizon" for our OpenStack clouds, for viewing and managing a user's cloud resources.
Ephemeral disk	Virtual disk files, associated (and destroyed) with an instance/VM.
Flavour	The OpenStack term for defining the compute, memory, and storage capacity of a new instance/VM
Floating IP	An IP address that can be associated with an instance/VM to allow external access
FTP	An obsolete file transfer protocol (should not be used for new deployments)
Horizon	See "dashboard"
Host	The physical resources supporting an instance/VM
Image	Files which contain the contents of a virtual disk, often a base operating system in the creation of a volume or ephemeral disk
Instance	A virtual server in the cloud infrastructure. Also known as a Virtual Machine (VM)
IPV6/Internet Protocol Version 6
Object Storage	Persistent storage space for large amounts of data. Typically read access only, e.g. images and data sets.
OpenStack	The software suite used on Compute Canada clouds to control hardware resources such as computers, storage and networking
Persistent Cloud	An instance/VM anticipated to run indefinitely, such as web servers, database servers, etc. Typically has low or bursty CPU requirements.
RAS/Rapid Access Service	Program allowing PI's to request and receive a given amount of Cloud resources
RAC/Resource Allocation Competition	Program via which PIs can request additional resources
S3/Simple Storage Service	A type of object storage
Security Group	A set of rules controlling network traffic to and from an instance/VM
Snapshot	A copy of a volume that can be used as a backup or to launch another instance/VM.
SSL/Secure Sockets Layer	Protocol to allow encrypted communications over networks
SWIFT	Another type of object storage
Tenant	A group or user's allocation of cloud resources (now called a Project)
VCPU/Virtual central processing unit	An instance/VM can have one or more CPUs assigned to it, each of which is seen as a single physical CPU core by the operating system.
VGPU/Virtual graphics processing unit	An instance/VM can have one or more VGPUs assigned to it.
Volume	An allocation of storage resources that can be attached or detached to/from an instance/VM, exposed as a block device (a virtual disk).
VM/Virtual Machine	See "instance"