ACA stands for Azure Container Apps. Azure Container Apps are a flavor of a hosted Kubernetes services in the Microsoft Azure cloud. ACA is a fully Platform As A Service (PaaS) resource. In the ACA service, Microsoft manages all components of the underlying Kubernetes cluster, including the system nodes (control plane) and the user nodes ... Read more
ACI stands for Azure Container Instance. It is a lightweight container PaaS service which allows the end customer to deploy, configure and manage a simple container-based solution based on a docker or other container image, without having to manage the underlying container cluster components. ACI can work together with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) by making ... Read more
ACR stands for Azure Container Registry. It is a PaaS resource which encapsulates the management of container images, such as Docker images in the Microsoft Azure Cloud. ACR is tightly integrated to other container services in Azure, such as AKS. An AKS cluster can utilize an ACR registry to pull its container images from. An ... Read more
ACU The concept of the Azure Compute Unit (ACU) encapsulates infomation about CPU performance in each Azure service which relies on CPU performance to classify its SKU plan. The basic reference for ACU is the Azure Standard_A1 (small) VM corresponding to 100 ACUs. All other Azure compute service SKUs advertise certain levels of ACU, which ... Read more
AI accelerator An AI accelerator is a specialized hardware component which is mainly utilized for artificial intelligence tasks. It can perform AI computations in a more efficient manner than conventional computer processors (CPU), hence AI accelerators are also known as Neural Processing Units (NPU). By using algorithms for parallelism, AI accelerators can enchance performance of ... Read more
Artificial Intelligence (AI) relates to computer hardware in multiple ways, as follows: AI platforms are being used to optimize the design and manufacturing of new compute hardware systems. Special computer hardware processor units, referred to as AI accelerators or Neural Processing Units (NPU) are being developed to enhance the performance of AI applications and machine ... Read more
AKS standards for Azure Kubernetes Service. It is an Azure cloud managed fully-featured Kubernetes cluster service. In AKS, there are system node pools and user node pools. System node pools host the AKS infrastructure components, i.e. the control plane components of the Kubernetes cluster, such as the API server. User node pools host the customer ... Read more
An algorithm is a series of instructions, either in the form of pseudo-code or in a computer programming language, which aim at solving a problem or at performing some sort of computation. Algorithms are therefore strongly connected to various fields of mathematics and physics, such as probability and statics, calculus and linear algebra. Algorithms apply ... Read more
The Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) is an open integration and messaging standard for communication of business messages among applications. AMQP acts as an integration service protocol or middleware protocol. Review the official protocol documentation at https://www.amqp.org/about/what for more details.
ANN stands for artificial neural network. It is an electronic neural network which simulates the operations and features of human brain neural networks.
Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform for high-performance data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration, and mission-critical applications. Microsoft Azure has a Kafka service implementation in its HDInsight cloud service. In Azure you can also use Azure Event Hubs to stream data from Apache Kafka applications without setting up a Kafka cluster on ... Read more
Artificial intelligence (AI) means developing intelligence in computing systems and robots. Artificial intelligence emulates human brain intelligence and is capable of executing tasks which require cognitive ability. The most common cognitive services which can be implemented in AI are the following: Language, including Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) Computer vision, including ... Read more
Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) are custom-built integrated circuit (IC) electronic systems, which are designed to optimize AI and ML workloads. ASICs have a large application spectrum, including for example video and voice codecs. In contrast to ASICs which are application specific, there are various general purpose Integrated Circuit systems, such as FPGAs.
AUC stands for Area Under the Curve. This refers to the two-dimensional area which is defined by a mathematical plot curve, the x-axis and two boundary points.
Authentication Authentication in computer systems uses application protocols to verify that the identity which is requesting access to a computing system is actually who they say they are. Common authentication protocols are OpenID, NTLM, Kerberos, PAP and CHAP. There is a long list of authentication protocols available, each one being applicable to different systems and ... Read more
Authorization Authorization works right after authentication, in order to grant access and permissions to an identity requesting access to IT resources. The most common authorization protocol is OAuth, now in OAuth 2.0 version. At least one and a resource owner are involved in the authorization process. Authorization works by having an authorization server assign access ... Read more
Azure is Microsoft's public cloud platform, offering a vast range of cloud computing services from its multitude of geographical regions and datacenters. Azure offers all types of cloud services, including IaaS, PaaS and SaaS and is in the top 3 list of global cloud service providers. You can read more details about Azure services and ... Read more
