Cloud Computing Concepts Hub
The Cloud Computing Concepts Hub is the centralized place where you can browse or search for informative articles about cloud computing. You'll find easy-to-understand info about broad topics such as "What is Machine Learning?" and "What is Data Science?" These articles are intended to help you up-level your understanding of frequently asked cloud computing topics.
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Databases
What Is a SQL Database?
SQL database is a data collection visualized as tables with rows and columns. Data is stored similarly to a spreadsheet, with columns indicating data attributes and rows describing the entity or object the data is about. Most SQL databases use the structured query language (SQL) for user-data interaction—hence the name. They are relational databases because you can store data relationships between tables.
For example, a products table has columns like product name, type, cost, etc, and a row contains values for the individual products. A customer table has columns with customer names and contact details. You can create a third table that links customer data with the products they purchased.
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Analytics
What Is Data Architecture?
Data architecture is the overarching framework that describes and governs an organization's data collection, management, and usage. Organizations today have vast data volumes coming in from various data sources and disparate teams wanting to access that data for analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and other applications. Modern data architecture presents a cohesive system that makes data accessible and usable while ensuring data security and quality. It defines policies, data models, processes, and technologies that allow organizations to easily move data across departments and ensure it is available whenever needed—including real-time access—while fully supporting regulatory compliance.
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Management and Governance
What Is An ISV (Independent Software…
An independent software vendor (ISV) is an organization that creates and sells software products that are independent of the underlying hardware and operating systems. The software solution typically solves a specific customer problem, such as creating and managing sales or financial data. It could also be infrastructure software that supports data storage, security or authentication. The vendor ensures software compatibility with various hardware platforms to target a broad customer base.
ISVs sell their software in different formats like perpetual licenses, term agreements, or Software as a Service (SaaS). The software is licensed to customers but the ownership rights are retained by the ISV.
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Artificial Intelligence
What is a Chatbot?
A chatbot is a program or application that users can converse with through voice or text. Chatbots were first developed in the 1960s, and the technology powering them has changed over time. Chatbots traditionally use predefined rules to converse with users and provide scripted answers. Contemporary chatbots use natural language processing (NLP) to understand users, and they can respond to complex questions with great depth and accuracy. Your organization can use chatbots to scale, personalize, and improve communication in everything from customer service workflows to DevOps management.
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Artificial Intelligence
What Is Enterprise AI?
Enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) is the adoption of advanced AI technologies within large organizations. Taking AI systems from prototype to production introduces several challenges around scale, performance, data governance, ethics, and regulatory compliance. Enterprise AI includes policies, strategies, infrastructure, and technologies for widespread AI use within a large organization. Even though it requires significant investment and effort, enterprise AI is important for large organizations as AI systems become more mainstream.
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Artificial Intelligence
What is Text Classification?
Text classification is the process of assigning predetermined categories to open-ended text documents using artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) systems. Many organizations have large document archives and business workflows that continually generate documents at scale—like legal documents, contracts, research documents, user-generated data, and email. Text classification is the first step to organize, structure, and categorize this data for further analytics. It allows automatic document labeling and tagging. This saves your organization thousands of hours you'd otherwise need to read, understand, and classify documents manually.
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Artificial Intelligence
What are AI Agents?
An artificial intelligence (AI) agent is a software program that can interact with its environment, collect data, and use the data to perform self-determined tasks to meet predetermined goals. Humans set goals, but an AI agent independently chooses the best actions it needs to perform to achieve those goals. For example, consider a contact center AI agent that wants to resolves customer queries. The agent will automatically ask the customer different questions, look up information in internal documents, and respond with a solution. Based on the customer responses, it determines if it can resolve the query itself or pass it on to a human.
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Developer Tools
What are Developer Tools?
Developer tools are technologies that make software development faster and more efficient. Software development is a complex process of translating real-world objects into mathematical and electronic representations that machines can understand and manipulate. Developer tools act as an interface between the physical reality and computing processes. They include programming languages, frameworks, and platforms that abstract different levels of complexity. This means you can interact with computers more easily and solve more complex problems. Instead of working with hardware components and low-level coding languages, you can work with libraries, APIs, and other abstractions that prioritize business use cases. Developer tools also include software applications, components, and services that simplify the process of coding.
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Databases
What is a Serverless Database?
A serverless database is database technology where the underlying database servers and IT infrastructure are fully managed for you by a third-party cloud provider. Traditionally, organizations deployed database systems on self-managed servers and had to ensure server configurations were updated and well-maintained as demand increased. In contrast, serverless databases run on fully managed cloud infrastructure and scale elastically as workloads change. Popular serverless databases can be relational databases or NoSQL databases. They provide inherent availability, fault tolerance, and reliability—you only pay for actual database usage. Service level agreements (SLAs) govern performance capabilities so you can confidently focus on data collection and analysis instead of database infrastructure.
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Containers
What are Cloud Containers?
Cloud containers are software code packages that contain an application’s code, its libraries, and other dependencies that it needs to run in the cloud. Any software application code requires additional files called libraries and dependencies before it can run. Traditionally, software had to be packaged in multiple formats to run in different environments such as Windows, Linux, Mac, and mobile. However, a container packages the software and all of its dependencies into a single file that can run anywhere. Running the container in the cloud provides additional flexibility and performance benefits at scale.
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Artificial Intelligence
What is Intelligent Document Processing…
Intelligent document processing (IDP) is automating the process of manual data entry from paper-based documents or document images to integrate with other digital business processes. For example, consider a business process workflow that automatically issues orders to suppliers when stock levels are low. Although the process is automated, no order is shipped until the supplier receives payment. The supplier sends an invoice via email, and the accounts team enters the data manually before completing payment—introducing manual checkpoints that create bottlenecks or errors. Instead, IDP systems automatically extract invoice data and enter it in the required format in the accounting system. You can use document processing to automate document management with the use of machine learning (ML) and various artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.
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Artificial Intelligence
What are Autoregressive Models?
Autoregressive models are a class of machine learning (ML) models that automatically predict the next component in a sequence by taking measurements from previous inputs in the sequence. Autoregression is a statistical technique used in time-series analysis that assumes that the current value of a time series is a function of its past values. Autoregressive models use similar mathematical techniques to determine the probabilistic correlation between elements in a sequence. They then use the knowledge derived to guess the next element in an unknown sequence. For example, during training, an autoregressive model processes several English language sentences and identifies that the word “is” always follows the word “there.” It then generates a new sequence that has “there is” together.
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