Glossary
Use the A-to-Z glossary to find Elastio-defined terms used throughout the Elastio guide.
Amazon EC2 instance is a virtual server in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for running applications on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure.
Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is a cloud computing service in Amazon Web Services (AWS) that manages containers and allows developers to run applications in the cloud without having to configure an environment for the code to run in.
Amazon EFS or Amazon Elastic File System provides a simple, serverless, set-and-forget elastic file system for use with AWS Cloud services and on-premises resources. It is built to scale on demand to petabytes without disrupting applications, growing and shrinking automatically as you add and remove files, eliminating the need to provision and manage capacity to accommodate growth.
Amazon machine image (AMI) is a compute engine resource that stores all the configuration, metadata, permissions, and data required to create a virtual machine (VM) instance. Consequently, to launch an instance, you must first specify an AMI.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.
Ansible is an open-source automation tool that uses playbooks to enable deployments in a faster and more scalable way for various environments.
Ansible playbook is a blueprint of automation tasks which are complex IT actions executed with limited or no human involvement. Ansible playbooks are executed on a set, group or classification of hosts which together make up an Ansible inventory.
App-consistent backup A backup or snapshot is application consistent if, in addition to being write-order consistent, running applications and processes complete all their operations and flush their buffers to disk (application quiesce).
AWS CodePipeline is a fully managed continuous delivery service that helps you automate your release pipelines for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates.
AWS Fargate is a technology that you can use with Amazon ECS to run containers without having to manage servers or clusters of Amazon EC2 instances.
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a web service that helps you securely control access to AWS resources. You use IAM to control who is authenticated (signed in) and authorized (has permissions) to use resources.
AWS Lambda is a serverless, event-driven compute service that lets you run code for virtually any type of application or backend service without provisioning or managing servers.
AWS Lambda function is a resource that you can invoke to run your code in Lambda. A function has code to process the events that you pass into the function or that other AWS services send to the function.
AWS IAM Policy is an object in AWS that, when associated with an entity or resource, defines permissions for this resource. Policies are used within AWS IAM roles and users for access control. AWS evaluates these policies when an IAM principal (user or role) makes a request. Permissions in the policies determine whether the request is allowed or denied.
AWS resource is an entity that exists within AWS. Examples include but are not limited to Amazon EC2 instances, AWS CloudFormation stacks and Amazon S3 buckets.
AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) is a web service that enables you to request temporary, limited-privilege credentials for AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users or for users you authenticate (federated users).
Background jobs are operations performed by Elastio within your AWS account. An elastio-vault-<vault-name>-worker EC2 instance is initiated to let ScaleZ deduplicate, compress and encrypt data and metadata when doing a backup, restore or mount. A separate elastio-background-job-worker EC2 instance is launched to run backup, restore or mount operations as background jobs, and is terminated when the operations are completed. This allows you to backup and restore AWS EC2 and AWS EBS from any anywhere with Elastio CLI, even if you are running the CLI on a local workstation or a server which isn’t in AWS.
CircleCI is the world’s largest shared continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) platform.
CLI or command-line interface is a text-based UI (user interface) that allows users to interact with a computer system or application by typing text or commands into the CLI. The software that handles the CLI is known as the shell or command language interpreter. The most commonly used shells are the Windows shell and the Bash shell for Linux. In the Elastio stack, the Elastio CLI is used to perform backups, restores, recovery point mounts, user and access token management, as well as all other Elastio components management.
Cloud Connector lives in your AWS account and services the APIs that Elastio CLI and the Elastio Tenant use. Elastio is deployed to the AWS account in 2 parts: an account-level Elastio CloudFormation stack is deployed first, followed by a regional Elastio Cloud Connector.
Container is a standard unit of software that packages up code and all its dependencies so the application runs quickly and reliably from one computing environment to another.
Crash-consistent backup A crash-consistent backup takes a snapshot of all the files at the exact same time, which results in all interrelated data components to remain as they were at the moment of backup.
Default Policies are policies pre-configured by Elastio upon Tenant creation. There are 3 frequency options: daily, weekly or monthly. Integrity scan for malware and ransomware checks are included into each policy. All you have to do is to add your assets, which can be obtained by selecting individual assets or specifying tags by which the assets will be filtered.
Development CI/CD pipeline is a set of automated processes that allow developers and DevOps professionals to reliably and efficiently compile, build, and deploy their code to their production compute platforms.
EBS Snapshots are a point-in-time copy of your data and can be used to enable disaster recovery, migrate data across regions and accounts, and improve backup compliance. You can create and manage your EBS Snapshots through the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) or the AWS SDKs.
Elastio is the first data protection-as-code platform for all of your data in the cloud. With a mission to make protecting and securing customer data as easy as pushing code, Elastio provides the safety of backups that you can easily automate and the security of robust ransomware and malware detection for all of your cloud assets.
Elastio resources are entities created by Elastio within your AWS account. These entities are required to protect and restore your application data within your CI/CD pipeline. Elastio resources can be of different types and identified by ‘elastio’ prefixes and/or tags in accordance with a type restrictions.
Elastio Tenant is a logically separated instance of Elastio dedicated to a specific customer. Elastio Tenant has its own users, associated AWS accounts, roles, security keys, and a dedicated subdomain. Your tenant can automatically deploy Elastio stack updates, communicates with the Elastio Cloud Connectors deployed in your AWS account(s), monitors the status of jobs and alerts you when something is wrong.
IAM role is an IAM identity that you can create in your account that has specific permissions.
Integrity Scan (iscan) helps to defend your data from ransomware and malware attacks by detecting ransomware hiding in recovery points and monitoring changes over time to identify ransomware attacks in progress.
Jenkins is an open-source automation server that integrates with a number of AWS Services, such as AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeDeploy, Amazon EC2 Spot, and Amazon EC2 Fleet.
Kafka is a distributed system consisting of servers and clients that communicate via a high-performance TCP network protocol.
Malware is any software intentionally designed to cause disruption to a computer, server, client or computer network, leak private information, gain unauthorized access to information or systems, deprive users access to information or which unknowingly interferes with the user’s computer security and privacy.
Ransomware is a type of malware from cryptovirology that threatens to publish the victim’s personal data or perpetually block access to it unless a ransom is paid.
ScaleZ is a storage engine that stores data and metadata in a deduplicated, compressed and encrypted form.
Shrink volume allows you to create a new disk space from the existing disk and it will be an unallocated region. If you discover that you need an additional partition but do not have additional disks, you can refer to the following steps to create it.
Sparse file is a type of computer file that allows for efficient storage allocation for large data. A file is considered to be sparse when much of its data is zero (empty data). Support for the creation of such files is generally provided by the file system.
Stdin is the standard input device, also referred to as stdin, is the device from which input to the system is taken.
Stdout, also known as standard output, is the default file descriptor where a process can write output.
Stream is a sequence of data elements made available over time.
Tenant is a logically separated instance of the Elastio service dedicated to a specific customer. An Elastio Tenant has its own users, associated AWS accounts, roles, security keys and a dedicated subdomain. Your Elastio Tenant can automatically deploy Elastio stack updates, communicate with the Cloud Connectors deployed in your AWS account(s), monitor the status of jobs and alert you when something is wrong.
Vault is an Elastio concept which stands for a number of resources serving to a purpose of managing and supporting all backup and restore operations. The resources within a vault allow to manage ScaleZ instances autoscaling, DB read/write operations, lambda interaction, task execution, etc.
Virtual Machine (VM) in computing is the virtualization/emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized hardware, software, or a combination.