Technical Glossary

Microsoft's cloud computing platform that provides a range of cloud services, including compute, analytics, storage, and networking. Users can pick and choose from these services to develop and scale new applications, or run existing applications in the public cloud.

The frameworks, guidelines, and mechanisms used to ensure the responsible and ethical development, deployment, and use of artificial intelligence technologies. AI governance aims to maximize AI's benefits while mitigating its risks and ensuring it aligns with human values, legal requirements, and ethical principles.

Software entities that can perform tasks autonomously on behalf of users or other systems, using artificial intelligence capabilities like perception, reasoning, and decision-making. AI agents can interact with their environment and adapt their behavior based on feedback and changing conditions.

Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) is a method of frequently delivering apps to customers by introducing automation into the stages of app development. The main concepts attributed to CI/CD are continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment.

A cloud computing technology that isolates sensitive data in a protected CPU enclave during processing. The data remains encrypted until it is processed in the enclave, helping to protect the privacy and integrity of both the data and the code that processes it from the cloud provider and other privileged users.

An approach to culture, automation, and platform design that integrates security as a shared responsibility throughout the entire IT lifecycle. DevSecOps involves building security into development processes from the beginning, rather than adding it at the end.

The concept that data is subject to the laws and governance structures within the nation where it is collected or processed. In cloud computing, data sovereignty issues arise when data that an organization collects is stored in a different country and may be subject to different legal requirements.

The process of managing and provisioning computer data centers through machine-readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools. IaC helps to enable DevOps practices by allowing the same code to be used by development, testing, and production environments.

An open-source platform designed to automate deploying, scaling, and operating application containers. It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery.

A type of artificial intelligence system designed to understand and generate human language. LLMs are trained on vast amounts of text data and can perform tasks like answering questions, writing essays, summarizing documents, translating languages, and generating creative content.

An architectural style that structures an application as a collection of services that are highly maintainable and testable, loosely coupled, independently deployable, and organized around business capabilities. The microservices architecture enables the continuous delivery/deployment of large, complex applications.

A cloud computing environment that adheres to specific data sovereignty, privacy, and security regulations of a particular country or region. Sovereign clouds are designed to keep data within geographic boundaries and comply with local laws regarding data storage and processing.

An open-source infrastructure as code software tool created by HashiCorp. Users define and provide data center infrastructure using a declarative configuration language, and Terraform generates an execution plan describing what it will do to reach the desired state and then executes it to build the described infrastructure.

A security concept centered on the belief that organizations should not automatically trust anything inside or outside their perimeters and instead must verify everything trying to connect to their systems before granting access. Zero Trust assumes breach and verifies each request as though it originates from an open network.