Glossary
Page last updated: November 24, 2015
| Term | Definition | 
|---|---|
| API | Application Programming Interface | 
| Availability Zone (AZ) | A functionally independent segment of network infrastructure, often correlated with geographical region, designated to increase availability and fault-tolerance. A cloud operator can select or assign AZs on platforms such as AWS and vSphere. | 
| BOSH | BOSH is an open framework for managing the full development and deployment life cycle of large-scale distributed software applications. | 
| CLI | Command Line Interface | 
| DEA | Droplet Execution Agent. The DEA is the component in Cloud Foundry responsible for staging and hosting applications. | 
| Domains | A domain is a domain name like shared-domain.com. Domains can also be multi-level and contain sub-domains like the “myapp” in myapp.shared-domain.com. Domain objects belong to an org and are not directly bound to apps. | 
| Droplet | An archive within Cloud Foundry that contains the application ready to run on a DEA. A droplet is the result of the application staging process. | 
| Management | You can manage spaces and orgs with the cf command line interface, the Cloud Controller API, and the Cloud Foundry Eclipse Plugin. | 
| Ops Manager or Operations Manager | Operations Manager is a web application that you use to deploy and manage a Pivotal Cloud Foundry® PaaS. | 
| Org | An org is the top-most meta object within the Cloud Foundry infrastructure. Only an account with administrative privileges on a Cloud Foundry instance can manage its orgs. | 
| Routes | A route, based on a domain with an optional host as a prefix, may be associated with one or more applications. For example, myapp is the host and shared-domain.com is the domain when using the route myapp.shared-domain.com. It is possible to have a route that represents shared-domain.com without a host. Routes are children of domains and are directly bound to apps. | 
| Service | A “factory” which produces service instances. | 
| Service Instance | A reserved resource provisioned by a service. The resource provisioned will differ by service; could be a database or an account on a multi-tenant application. | 
| Spaces | An org can contain multiple spaces. You can map a domain to multiple spaces, but you can map a route to only one space. | 
| Staging | The process in Cloud Foundry by which the raw bits of an application are transformed into a droplet that is ready to execute. | 
| Warden | The mechanism for containerization on DEAs that ensures applications running on Cloud Foundry have a fair share of computing resources and cannot access either the system code or other applications running on the DEA. |