Your Azure Cheat Sheet of Terminology

Use this cheat sheet as a simple, quick resource as you review and study for Azure certifications and work through our courses. 

We don’t just want you to memorize definitions – we want you to understand and recognize these terms and concepts, so we’ve taken the definitions Azure has provided and simplified them. Happy training!

1. Advisor: Free service that helps users optimize their Azure resources by providing recommendations for improving the performance, security, and cost-effectiveness of their Azure deployments.
2. Auto scaling: Automates the process of adding or removing compute resources based on traffic demand for your application.
3. Auto scaling: Automates the process of adding or removing compute resources based on traffic demand for your application.
4. Availability set: A set of virtual machines that are managed together to increase availability and reliability during maintenance events, leaving at least one machine available.
5. Availability Zones: A physically separate location within an Azure region that provides redundant power, networking, and cooling, and is designed to be highly resilient to potential failures.
6. Azure Active Directory (Azure AD): Azure’s identity and access management service, allowing users to securely manage access to applications, services and resources.
7. Azure Resource Manager (ARM): The service that allows users to deploy, manage and monitor their Azure resources in a consistent and predictable way.
8. Blob Storage: Scalable and cost-effective object storage service for storing large amounts of unstructured data, such as documents, images, videos, and audio, as well as structured data in the form of text or binary files.
9. CLI: Command-line interface for managing Azure resources from Windows, macOS, and Linux environments.
10. Cognitive Services: A collection of artificial intelligence (AI) services and APIs that allow developers to add intelligent features, such as computer vision and speech recognition, to their applications.
11. Content Delivery Network (CDN): A network of servers that let you deliver content to users all over the world more quickly through storing content at strategic endpoints.
12. Cosmos DB: A globally distributed, multi-model, NoSQL database that boasts infinite scale for multiple APIs, including graph, JSON, wide-column, and relational formats.
13. Cost Management: Suite of tools that help organizations monitor, allocate, and optimize the cost of their cloud workloads.
14. Data Lake Storage: Scalable and secure data storage service for big data analytics workloads, specifically designed for storing large amounts of structured and unstructured data.
15. DDoS Protection: Service that protects your resources from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks through automatic detection and mitigation.
16. DevOps: Software as a service (SaaS) platform that provides an end-to-end DevOps toolchain for developing and deploying software.
17. Disaster Recovery: A benefit of cloud that helps restore critical applications in the event of an emergency or outage, often by creating secondary sites for your important services.
18. Disk Storage: Durable and highly available storage for Azure virtual machines.
19. DNS server: Database of website domains and their corresponding IP addresses.
20. Elasticity: The ability of a system to increase and decrease in size.
21. Event Grid: A fully managed event routing service that enables you to create rules to automatically send messages to other Azure services.
22. Event Hubs: Service that ingests, processes, and monitors events from multiple sources, allowing you to build real-time data pipelines for big data scenarios.
23. Fault tolerance: A property that enables a system to continue operating properly in the event of the failure of one or more components.
24. Firewall: A type of software that either allows or blocks certain kinds of internet traffic to pass through it.
25. Functions: ​​Serverless compute service that enables you to run small pieces of code (called "functions") in response to events or on-demand.
26. High availability: Refers to systems that are durable and likely to operate continuously without failure for a long time.
27. IoT Central: SaaS platform that makes it easy to connect, monitor and manage Internet of Things (IoT) assets at scale.
28. IoT Hub: PaaS platform, offering more flexible/configurable IoT solutions for organizations that need to connect, monitor and manage IoT devices.
29. Key Vault: Service that allows you to securely store and manage keys, passwords and certificates that are used by your applications.
30. Load Balancer: A load balancer distributes incoming traffic to virtual machines within a load-balancer set.
31. Logic Apps: Low-code integration platform that allows you to automate business processes and workflows.
32. Machine Learning: Service that enables you to build, deploy, and manage ML models at scale.
33. Machine Learning Studio: Web-based tool that provides a visual interface for building, training, and deploying ML models.
34. Marketplace: Online store that provides a range of applications, tools, and services that are designed to work with Azure.
35. Monitor: Service that provides features for security and performance logging, monitoring, and troubleshooting Azure resources.
36. Network Security Groups (NSG): Allows you to control inbound and outbound network traffic to and from resources based on a variety of criteria, such as IP address.
37. Policy: Service that allows you to create, assign and manage policies for your resources - helping to ensure compliance and consistent resource configurations across your organization.
38. Portal: The secure web portal used to deploy and manage Azure services.
39. PowerShell: Command-line interface to manage Azure services via a command line from Windows PCs.
40. Pricing Calculator: Allows you to estimate the costs for Azure products and services.
41. Regions: An Azure region is a separate geographic area that is made up of one or more data centers, isolated from other regions to reduce the impact of outages.
42. Resource groups: Logical containers in Azure that allow you to group resources together to make it easier to organize and monitor them.
43. Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): The idea of assigning and restricting permissions based on a user's role in an organization.
44. Scalability: The ability of a system to easily increase in size and capacity in a cost-effective way.
45. Security Center: Set of tools for monitoring and managing the security of your resources.
46. Service Bus: Service that allows you to exchange messages between applications and services in a reliable, scalable and secure way.
47. Service Health: Service that provides notifications and alerts about the availability and performance of your services, as well as guidance on how to resolve any issues.
48. Service Level Agreement (SLA): The agreement that describes Microsoft's commitments for uptime and connectivity. Each Azure service has a specific SLA.
49. Service Trust Portal: Microsoft website that provides information about the security, privacy, and compliance of Microsoft's online services, including Azure.
50. SQL Database: Easy to use relational database service that provides a scalable and secure platform for storing and managing data.
51. SQL Data Warehouse: Data warehousing service that allows you to store and analyze large amounts of data in the cloud.
52. Subnet: A subsection of IP addresses within a virtual network that you can use to segment and isolate network traffic.
53. Trust Center: Microsoft website that provides information about the security, privacy, and compliance of Azure.
54. Virtual machine (VM): A software emulation of a physical computer that runs an operating system and is available in a variety of sizes.
55. Virtual Machine Scale Sets: These are used to run multiple instances of your application, that can scale for customers as needed with minimal interruption.
56. Virtual Network (VNet): A network that allows you to securely connect your Azure resources to each other and the internet.
57. Virtual Private Network (VPN) Gateway: What you need to establish connections between your virtual networks, and between them and on-premise networks.
58. Well-Architected Framework: Set of best practices and guidelines for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective systems in the cloud.

Many of these terms and simplified definitions were pulled from our AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals course and our Azure Concepts course, one of many free courses at ACG!

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