Definitions: Vocabulary
Application
An AWS application is the top-level node in a hierarchy of related cloud resource abstractions. Applications can include one or more of these abstractions (such as CloudFormation stacks and resource groups), which consist of one or more running AWS resources.
Compliance
In general, compliance means conforming to a defined rule, such as a policy, regulation, law, or specification. Organizations strive to ensure that they are aware of and take appropriate steps to identify the full scope of compliance requirements, and establish processes to ensure expectations are met and can be evidenced.
Governance
Governance focuses on the what, with emphasis on defining and achieving an organization’s strategy. Governance activities emphasize how decisions are made, by whom, and accountability for the resulting decisions.
Key outputs of governance include:
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organizational strategy defined in formal policies and standards
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funding
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clear ownership and accountability for all aspects of implementation, ongoing assessment, and oversight
Guardrail
Guardrails define the boundaries that limit activity aligned with organizational control requirements. This would include standards in technology and technology resources, application architecture, operational requirements, and security requirements.
Management
Management activities focus on the how, looking to optimize processes to achieve organization’s vision. Management is responsible for the execution and delivery of the strategy, with responsibility for allocation of resources to run and oversee day-to-day operations.
Key outputs of management include:
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Defined operational processes and tooling
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Budget and expense management
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Resource allocation and talent management
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Team structure and direction
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Performance monitoring (human and environment)
Monitoring
Monitoring is the systematic process of collecting and analyzing information to form an opinion.
Operations
Operations are activities taken to create, monitor, modify, expand, and remove applications and resources.
Oversight
Oversight is the responsibility over cloud resources and activities to validate compliance with organizational requirements.
Resource
Resource refers to cloud-based resources and are are defined as cloud services, infrastructure and objects that make up part of a cloud platform supporting a variety of application types. This can refer to compute services such as Amazon EC2 instances, a database service such as Amazon RDS, cloud network services such as gateways and load balancers, and storage services such as Amazon S3 and Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS).
Supervision
Supervision is the activity of directing, managing, or overseeing operational activities.
