Cloud Computing and DevOps Study Guide: 99 Flashcards from IaaS to DORA Metrics
Learn cloud and DevOps vocabulary with 99 flashcards: the five essential characteristics, IaaS to SaaS, GitOps, DevSecOps, DORA metrics and the CLOUD Act.
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Cloud and DevOps vocabulary has a nasty property: every term sounds obvious and almost none of them are. Elasticity is not scalability. Multi-cloud is not poly cloud. SRE predates DevOps rather than descending from it. Reading a glossary once leaves you with the illusion of knowing.
Study this deck: Cloud Computing & DevOps
1 / 10Cloud computing according to ISO
Tap the card for the answer · swipe right if you knew it, left if not
That is what the Cloud Computing & DevOps deck (code BP5113, 99 cards) on Flip It is built for — it pulls its definitions from ISO, NIST and DORA rather than from marketing pages.
A sample of the deck
| Card front | Card back |
|---|---|
| Rapid elasticity | Capabilities can be elastically provisioned and released, sometimes automatically, to scale rapidly with demand and appear unlimited |
| Measured service | Cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource use through a metering capability allowing monitoring, controlling and reporting |
| Leaky abstraction in cloud computing | When abstractions meant to simplify resource management expose the underlying complexities anyway |
| Cloud bursting | An application runs in a private cloud or data center and bursts to a public cloud when demand spikes |
| Primary advantage of cloud bursting | The organization pays for extra compute resources only when they are needed |
| Four original DORA metrics | Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes, Mean Time to Recover, Change Failure Rate |
| Shift left | Performing security practices and testing earlier in the development lifecycle |
| DAST | Dynamic Application Security Testing — black-box testing of software without knowing its inner functions, also called penetration testing |
| GitOps | An evolution from DevOps where the deployment configuration state is version-controlled, typically using Git |
| Top three cloud security threats (Cloud Security Alliance) | Insecure interfaces and APIs (29%), data loss and leakage (25%), hardware failure (10%) |
What the 99 cards cover
Cloud foundations: the ISO definition, on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, multi-tenancy, the shared responsibility model, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, iPaaS, DPaaS, serverless computing, hypervisors, Linux containers with cgroups and namespaces, utility computing, autonomic computing, fog computing, and virtualization as the core enabling technology.
Deployment and risk: private, public, hybrid, community, multi-cloud and poly cloud, cloud migration, vendor and service lock-in, SLA exclusions, GDPR and HIPAA compliance, the CLOUD Act and its Article 48 conflict with GDPR, hyperjacking, OpenStack (Rackspace and NASA, 2010) and AWS Outposts (December 2019).
DevOps: shared ownership, workflow automation, rapid feedback, CI/CD, DORA, platform engineering and internal developer platforms, SRE as developed at Google in 2003, DevSecOps, SAST, software composition analysis, CWE, GitOps, database DevOps and schema drift, mobile DevOps, ArchOps, DevOps versus ITIL, fitness functions, least privilege, compensating controls, and the Toyota Production System roots — kaizen, small batches, the andon cord.
Two tips that make this deck stick
Learn the five essential characteristics first, then deduce the rest. On-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity and measured service are the block every certification exam leans on. Once they are automatic, most of the service-model and deployment-model cards stop being recall and become reasoning.
Treat IaaS, PaaS and SaaS as one sliding scale, not three definitions. Sketch the stack once — hardware, hypervisor, OS, runtime, application, data — and mark where the provider stops for each model. The shared-responsibility cards then answer themselves, and you stop mixing up who patches what.
One warning: the dated and numbered cards (2003, 2010, 2019, the CSA percentages) decay fastest — give them their own short review block.
Pair this deck with the AWS Cloud Practitioner flashcards for vendor specifics, and the cybersecurity fundamentals deck for the DevSecOps half.
Open Flip It and look up deck BP5113 in the library.
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