Cloud Native Glossary

Container & Deployment Terms Explained

Clear, technical definitions for the concepts behind modern container deployment — scale to zero, serverless containers, Knative, OCI images, and more.

Scale to Zero

Scale to zero is a cloud compute model where a running application's instances are reduced to zero when there is no active traffic, eliminating compute costs entirely during idle periods.

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Serverless Containers

Serverless containers are OCI-compatible container workloads that run on managed infrastructure with automatic scaling (including scale to zero), without the operator needing to provision, configure, or maintain servers or Kubernetes clusters.

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OCI Container Image

An OCI (Open Container Initiative) container image is a standardized packaging format for software that bundles an application, its runtime dependencies, and configuration into a portable, immutable artifact that can run on any compliant container runtime.

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Container Deployment

Container deployment is the process of taking an OCI container image from a registry, scheduling it on compute infrastructure, configuring networking and secrets, and making the application accessible to end users.

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Continuous Deployment (CD)

Continuous deployment (CD) is the practice of automatically deploying every code change that passes automated tests and quality checks directly to production, without manual intervention.

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Buildpacks

Buildpacks are tools that automatically detect a project's programming language and dependencies, compile the application, and produce a runnable OCI container image — without requiring a Dockerfile.

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Knative

Knative is an open-source platform built on Kubernetes that provides serverless workload management capabilities: automatic scaling (including scale-to-zero), traffic splitting between revisions, and event-driven service routing.

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Container Orchestration

Container orchestration is the automated management of containerized workloads across a cluster of machines — handling scheduling, scaling, networking, health monitoring, and service discovery without manual intervention.

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Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a cloud computing model where a provider manages the underlying infrastructure (servers, OS, networking, runtime) so developers can focus exclusively on writing and deploying application code.

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Container Registry

A container registry is a storage and distribution system for OCI container images. Registries store images organized by repository and tag, and serve them to container runtimes that pull images for execution.

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