Infrastructure glossary

Border Gateway Protocol — how autonomous networks on the internet advertise which IP prefixes they can reach.

Content delivery network — caches static assets closer to users to cut latency and origin load.

Domain Name System — translates human-readable hostnames into IP addresses services actually use.

Distributed denial-of-service — an attack that floods a target with traffic from many sources to exhaust capacity.

Traffic between services inside the same environment, as opposed to north-south client-to-server flows.

A control that permits or denies traffic based on rules — often at network boundaries or on hosts.

Identity and access management — policies and roles that define who and what can perform which actions.

Time for a request to travel across the network and return — critical for user experience and distributed systems.

Distributes incoming requests across healthy backends and can terminate TLS or perform health checks.

Multi-factor authentication — requires more than one proof of identity before granting access.

Network address translation — maps private addresses to public ones so internal hosts reach the internet.

A dedicated connection between your network and a cloud provider without traversing the public internet.

Sits in front of servers, handling TLS, routing, caching, and sometimes authentication.

Software-defined WAN — central policy controls how branch sites route traffic across multiple links.

A partitioned range of IP addresses inside a larger network, often used to separate tiers or teams.

Transport Layer Security — encrypts data in transit between clients and servers.

Virtual private cloud — isolated network space in a public cloud where you define subnets, routes, and gateways.

Virtual private network — encrypted tunnel connecting remote users or sites to a private network.

Web application firewall — inspects HTTP traffic for common attacks like SQL injection or XSS.

Security model that verifies every access attempt regardless of network location — "never trust, always verify."