Cloud Technical Glossary

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: A common web server type

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 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 a networks

SWIFT: Another type of object storage

Tenant: A group or user's allocation of cloud resources

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.

VM/Virtual Machine: See "instance"