Infrastructure pillar · Reference

Infrastructure terminology glossary

Key infrastructure terms you’ll encounter. Bookmark this for quick reference.

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Controls stack visual kit

Reusable icons and a telemetry-to-audit diagram aligned to our fundamentals and operational guides.

Governance evidence

Use for control statements that cite ISO/IEC 42001 clause 6.3 change management, EU AI Act Articles 62–75, and SOC 2 trust service criteria.

Secure supply chain

Pair with SBOM, provenance, and intake guidance that references SPDX or CycloneDX formats, SLSA Level 3 attestations, and NIST SSDF tasks PS.3/PO.4.

Telemetry & evaluations

Highlight logging of prompts, responses, refusal rates, and safety filters alongside adversarial evaluation suites from NIST AI RMF playbooks or UK AISI guidance.

Assurance & resilience

Use for incident response and assurance artefacts that must meet OMB M-24-10 24-hour notifications, CIRCIA’s 72-hour clocks, and serious-incident duties under the EU AI Act.

Signals Controls Evidence Audit

Signals: prompt traces, supplier advisories, and safety filter activations streamed into monitoring.
Controls: guardrails, change review, SBOM validation, and access enforcement tied to AI lifecycle gates.
Evidence: runbooks that capture artefacts for ISO/IEC 42001 management reviews and SOC 2 narratives.
Audit: regulator-facing packets that satisfy EU AI Act post-market monitoring, OMB M-24-10, and CIRCIA timelines.

Compute fundamentals

Server: A computer designed to process requests and deliver data to other computers. Can be physical hardware or virtual.
Virtual machine (VM): Software emulation of a physical computer. Multiple VMs can run on one physical server.
Hypervisor: Software that creates and manages VMs. VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, and KVM are common examples.
Container: Lightweight, portable package containing application code and dependencies. More efficient than VMs for many use cases.
Docker: Platform for building and running containers. The de facto standard for containerisation.
Kubernetes (K8s): System for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerised applications.
Bare metal: Physical servers without virtualisation. Maximum performance but less flexibility.

Cloud terms

IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service): Cloud model providing virtualised compute, storage, and networking. You manage the OS and up.
PaaS (Platform as a Service): Cloud model providing a ready-to-use platform. Just deploy your code.
SaaS (Software as a Service): Complete applications delivered over the internet. Gmail, Salesforce, Slack.
Region: Geographic area containing data centres. AWS has us-east-1, eu-west-1, etc.
Availability Zone (AZ): Isolated location within a region. Designing for multiple AZs improves resilience.
Auto-scaling: Automatically adding or removing compute resources based on demand.
Serverless: Computing model where the cloud provider manages servers. You pay only for execution time. AWS Lambda, Azure Functions.

Networking terms

IP address: Numerical identifier for a device on a network. IPv4 (e.g., 192.168.1.1) or IPv6.
DNS (Domain Name System): Translates human-readable domain names to IP addresses. The internet’s phone book.
Load balancer: Distributes traffic across multiple servers to ensure no single server is overwhelmed.
CDN (Content Delivery Network): Distributed servers that cache content closer to users for faster delivery. Cloudflare, Akamai.
VPN (Virtual Private Network): Encrypted tunnel over the internet providing secure remote access.
Subnet: Division of a network into smaller segments for organisation and security.
Bandwidth: Maximum rate of data transfer. Measured in bits per second (Mbps, Gbps).
Latency: Time delay for data to travel between two points. Measured in milliseconds.

Operations terms

SLA (Service Level Agreement): Formal commitment defining availability and performance targets. Usually expressed as uptime percentage.
SRE (Site Reliability Engineering): Discipline that applies software engineering to infrastructure and operations. Pioneered by Google.
MTTR (Mean Time to Recovery): Average time to restore service after a failure.
MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures): Average time a system operates before failing.
RTO (Recovery Time Objective): Maximum acceptable time for restoring a system after disaster.
RPO (Recovery Point Objective): Maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time.
PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness): Ratio of total data centre power to IT equipment power. Lower is more efficient.
IaC (Infrastructure as Code): Managing infrastructure through machine-readable configuration files. Terraform, CloudFormation.

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