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.