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Uniskai Help Glossary

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Updated over 3 months ago

FinOps: An evolving cloud financial management discipline and cultural practice that enables organizations to get maximum business value by helping engineering, finance, technology, and business teams to collaborate on data-driven spending decisions.

FinOps platform: A cloud management solution that helps businesses manage infrastructure costs to achieve control over cloud investments. It helps DevOps and FinOps teams to cooperate in a single environment, effectively visualizing, managing, securing, and optimizing cloud assets across the entire organization.

DevOps: A combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization's ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes.

IAM role: A role, used to define access to resources in a single account, but it isn’t restricted to users in a single account. For example: The EC2 servers in your staging environment can safely get access to an S3 bucket in production by using a properly defined role to do so. By setting up cross-account access, you don't have to create individual IAM users in each account. In addition, users don't have to sign out of one account and sign into another in order to access resources in different accounts.

Amazon Machine Image (AMI): A supported and maintained image provided by AWS that provides the information required to launch an instance. You must specify an AMI when you launch an instance. You can launch multiple instances from a single AMI when you require multiple instances with the same configuration. You can use different AMIs to launch instances when you require instances with different configurations.

Elastic IP address: A static IPv4 address designed for dynamic cloud computing. An Elastic IP address is allocated to your AWS account and is yours until you release it. By using an Elastic IP address, you can mask the failure of an instance or software by rapidly remapping the address to another instance in your account. Alternatively, you can specify the Elastic IP address in a DNS record for your domain, so that your domain points to your instance.

Snapshots: Incremental backups, which means that only the blocks on the device that have changed after your most recent snapshot are saved. This minimizes the time required to create the snapshot and saves on storage costs by not duplicating data. Each snapshot contains all of the information that is needed to restore your data (from the moment when the snapshot was taken) to a new EBS volume.

Amazon EBS volume: A durable, block-level storage device that you can attach to your instances. After you attach a volume to an instance, you can use it as you would use a physical hard drive.

Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2): A virtual server for running applications on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure.

Amazon's Elastic Container Service (ECS): A highly scalable and fast container management service. You can use it to run, stop, and manage containers on a cluster.


AWS Lambda: A compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers.

Lambda Log Group: Log groups are a standard part of CloudWatch and used to organize all logging.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS): A managed Kubernetes service that makes it easy for you to run Kubernetes on AWS and on-premises.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC): A service that lets you launch AWS resources in a logically isolated virtual network that you define. Amazon VPC gives you full control over your virtual networking environment, including resource placement, connectivity, and security.

Database: An organized collection of structured information, or data, typically stored electronically in a computer system. A database is usually controlled by a database management system (DBMS). Together, the data and the DBMS, along with the applications that are associated with them, are referred to as a database system, often shortened to just a database.

Amazon Auto Scaling group (ASG): A collection of EC2 instances that are treated as a logical grouping for the purposes of automatic scaling and management. An Auto Scaling group also lets you use Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling features such as health check replacements and scaling policies. Both maintaining the number of instances in an Auto Scaling group and automatic scaling are the core functionality of the Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling service.

Amazon SageMaker: A fully managed machine learning service. With SageMaker, data scientists and developers can quickly and easily build and train machine learning models, and then directly deploy them into a production-ready hosted environment.

Spot instances: EC2 instances in the AWS cloud, available at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices, used for various stateless, fault-tolerant, or flexible applications such as big data, containerized workloads, CI/CD, web servers, high-performance computing (HPC), and test & development workloads. Due to the operating scale of AWS, Spot Instances can offer scale and cost savings to run hyper-scale workloads. You also have the option to hibernate, stop, or terminate your Spot Instances when EC2 reclaims the capacity back with a two-minute notice.

EKS Node Groups: A feature that automates the provisioning and lifecycle management of nodes (EC2 instances) for Amazon EKS clusters. You can provision optimized groups of nodes for their clusters and EKS will keep their nodes up to date with the latest Kubernetes and host OS versions.

Amazone Fargate: A technology that you can use with Amazon ECS to run containers without having to manage servers or clusters of Amazon EC2 instances. With AWS Fargate, you no longer have to provision, configure, or scale clusters of virtual machines to run containers. This removes the need to choose server types, decide when to scale your clusters, or optimize cluster packing.

Reserved Instances: A billing discount that allows you to save on your Amazon EC2 usage costs. When you purchase a Reserved Instance, you can set attributes such as instance type, platform, tenancy, Region, or Availability Zone (optional). RIs act as an automatic discount on new or existing on-demand instances in your account. There are two classes of reserved instances in AWS: standard RI and convertible RI.

Amazon Relation Database service: A web service that makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the AWS Cloud. It provides cost-efficient, resizable capacity for an industry-standard relational database and manages common database administration tasks.

Amazon Redshift: A service that manages all of the work of setting up, operating, and scaling a data warehouse. These tasks include provisioning capacity, monitoring and backing up the cluster and applying patches and upgrades to the Amazon Redshift engine.

Amazon ElastiCache: A fully managed, in-memory caching service supporting flexible,

real-time use cases. You can use ElastiCache for caching, which accelerates application and database performance, or as a primary data store for use cases that don't require durability like session stores, gaming leaderboards, streaming, and analytics. With ElastiCache, you pay only for what you use with no minimum fee.

Amazon ElasticSearch: A distributed search and analytics engine built on Apache Lucene. It is an open-source database, commonly used for log analytics, full-text search, security intelligence, business analytics, and operational intelligence use cases.

Amazon Marketplace: A platform that supports the sale of third-party and AWS customers' unused Standard Reserved Instances, which vary in terms of lengths and pricing options.

Buy reservation: An action when our request goes to the owner of the organization and waits for approval to buy a reservation on AWS.

Convertible RI: An Amazon Reserved Instance that can be modified and exchanged for another convertible instance, but it provides a lower discount than a Standard Reserved Instance.

Region: A separate physical location around the world where Amazon clusters data centers for application and service delivery in AWS Availability Zones.

Standard RI: An Amazon Reserved Instance that provides the most significant discount but allows only modification and can’t be exchanged.

Submit for approval: An action when your request goes to the owner of the organization and waits for approval to buy a reservation on AWS.

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