# 3 Terminology

### Availability Zone

A distinct location within a region that is engineered to be isolated from failures in other zones, providing high availability and fault tolerance.

### Container

A process or set of processes that have their private and isolated view of the file system and network and compute capacity. All containers on a (virtual) machine share the same operating system.

### Containerization

A form of lightweight virtualization that involves encapsulating an application and its dependencies into a container that can run on any computing environment.

### Federation

The integration of multiple systems or organizations, allowing them to share resources and manage user identities across different domains while maintaining autonomy.

### Hypervisor

Software that creates and runs virtual machines by abstracting the hardware and allowing multiple operating systems to run concurrently on a host computer.

### IAM (Identity and Access Management)

A framework of policies and technologies for ensuring that the right individuals have access to the right resources at the right times for the right reasons.

### Infrastructure as Code

Virtual infrastructure (software defined storage, network, compute) is managed like code.

### Multi-tenancy

An architecture in which a single instance of software runs on a server and serves multiple tenants (users or organizations), ensuring secure isolation between them.

### Quota

Usage limits per kind of resource. Users can only create a limited amount of resources to avoid overly high bills or overly high consumption of limited resources.

### Region

A geographic area where cloud services and resources are deployed, typically consisting of multiple well-interconnected data centers to provide redundancy and ensure low-latency performance.

### UUID

Unique identifier. Typically a random number attached to a newly created resource and then used to uniquely identify and reference it. Commonly 128bit numbers in the format a78622a8-1177-47af-b5da-3378ee5d4313 are used. Other lengths and formatting are possible.

### Virtual Machines (VM)

The virtual hardware with virtual CPUs, memory (RAM), disks, network adapters where consumers can run an Operating System and Software of their choice.

### Virtualization

The process of creating an abstraction layer over computer hardware (storage, network, compute) that allows a computer to share its hardware with multiple virtual separated environments.