Page 262 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

GL OS SARY

Relational database: A data storage system based on a relational
model built from mathematical set theory. The relational model
relies on tables composed of columns and rows and was com-
posed by IBM researcher Edgar Codd.

REST: Representational State Transfer, or a high-performance,
lightweight method of conducting exchanges between two sys-
tems over the Internet using only XML for tagging data and

SOAP for transferring it.
Ruby on Rails: A dynamic language (Ruby) developed in Japan

that was given a framework aiding the fast development of ap-
plications. The Rails framework handles some programming
conventions, connections, and application programming in-
terface (API) manipulations automatically.

S3: Simple Storage Service, a permanent storage service in the
cloud at Amazon’s Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud
(EC2). It can be invoked through simple Web Service inter-
faces and stores data as objects, which can be retrieved through
a unique key that S3 assigns them.

Simple API for Cloud Application Services: An open source proj-
ect led by Zend Technologies to produce application program-
ming interfaces for particular cloud services. Applications
using a Simple API could access each service provider that has
adopted that particular interface, giving the application cross-
cloud capabilities.

SimpleDB: A database service available at Amazon Web Serv-
ices Elastic Compute Cloud that can store and query data
without the administrative overhead of a relational database

242