This page defines key terms and concepts used across Cloud Design Library architecture articles. It helps readers navigate technical patterns, services, and principles that underpin modern cloud-native designs.
Architecture & Design
- Pattern: A reusable solution to a recurring architectural problem.
- Blueprint: A high-level model that outlines technical and functional components of a system.
- Landing Zone: A preconfigured cloud environment with embedded security, networking, and governance controls.
- Layered Architecture: A design strategy that organizes systems into logical tiers (e.g., presentation, service, data).
Azure Services
- Azure API Management (APIM): A service for publishing, securing, monitoring, and versioning APIs.
- Azure Databricks: A collaborative platform for data engineering, analytics, and machine learning.
- Azure Data Lake Gen2: A hierarchical storage system optimized for big data analytics workloads.
- Azure Key Vault: A secure service for storing secrets, certificates, and encryption keys.
- Azure Front Door: A global layer 7 load balancer and routing service for low-latency, scalable applications.
- Azure Application Gateway: A regional application-level load balancer with built-in web application firewall (WAF).
- Azure Virtual Network (VNet): An isolated, logically segmented network in Azure for deploying secure resources.
Security & Identity
- Managed Identity: An Azure-provided identity for applications to access other Azure resources securely.
- RBAC (Role-Based Access Control): A model that assigns access permissions to users or services based on their role.
- OAuth 2.0: A token-based protocol for securing access to APIs.
- Subscription Key: An access token used in APIM to authenticate API consumers.
- Web Application Firewall (WAF): A security feature that protects web applications from common threats (e.g., SQL injection, XSS).
- Private Endpoint: A private IP within a VNet that allows secure access to Azure PaaS services.
DevOps & Automation
- CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment): A set of automated processes to build, test, and deploy applications.
- Self-Hosted Agent: A build or deployment agent running on a private machine, typically inside a secure network.
- Terraform / Bicep: Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools for provisioning and managing Azure resources.
- Pipeline: An automated sequence of tasks executed as part of the software delivery lifecycle.
Data Integration & Processing
- Ingestion Pipeline: An automated process to extract, transform, and load data into a target platform.
- Metadata-Driven Ingestion: A configurable ingestion framework where behavior is controlled via metadata, not code.
- Bronze / Silver / Gold Layers: A multi-zone data lake structure separating raw, curated, and business-ready data.
- Microsoft Graph API: RESTful API for accessing Microsoft 365 services such as SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive.
Networking & Connectivity
- Service Endpoint: A network path that allows secure traffic from a VNet to Azure services over the Azure backbone.
- Private Link: A private network connection to Azure PaaS services via a private IP inside the VNet.
- Network Virtual Appliance (NVA): A virtualized network device (e.g., firewall, proxy) used to manage or filter traffic.
- Subnet: A logical segment of a virtual network used to group resources or apply security controls.
- User-Defined Route (UDR): A custom routing rule used to control how traffic flows within or across subnets.
Observability & Monitoring
- Health Probe: A mechanism used by load balancers to monitor the health of backend services and instances.
- Azure Monitor: A platform for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry from Azure resources.
- Log Analytics: A query engine used to analyze logs and metrics across services.
- Application Insights: A monitoring tool that provides application-level performance and usage telemetry.
- Grafana: A visualization and dashboarding tool, often used for real-time monitoring via Log Analytics or other backends.
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