Glossary of Terms

Application Programming Interface is a defined contract between an application and any consuming software. It describes the structure of valid requests, responses and error handling so consuming software can be quickly built and manage various scenarios.

The 'Cloud' simply refers to a group of servers combined together to operate as one unified platform.

A bundle of software that can be run in isolation, independent of other components.

A software platform for running, managing and deploying containers, bundled software packages.

Graphical User Interface, or simply the user friendly version of a platform that can be used via mouse clicks and on mobile devices.

Stands for infrastructure as a service. This is meant to replace managing your own servers and to simply pay for your server needs as a service.

Software as a service is a set of API's and/or GUI that handles specific functions, speeding time to market for your application development. As an example, Perspective is a SaaS product designed to handle setting and feature management so developers don't need to write their own.