Welcome to SHIFT Basics, a collection of tips, explainers, guides, and advice to keep you up to speed with mobility tech.

If you’ve made, or are thinking about making, the shift to an electric car you’ll have to get up to speed on all the new terminology that comes with it.

While EVs aren’t that different to combustion engined vehicles in practice: the fact that they are powered by electricity throws up a lot of new things to learn when it comes to “filling up” or charging.

We’ve already given you the low down on two of the most popular

Microsoft announced Azure Arc, an application-centric tool for deploying and managing applications running on virtual infrastructures, towards the end of 2019. Since then it’s rolled out two waves of product previews: the first targeted at virtual machines running on-premises and in the cloud; the second, a more recent release, at applications running on Kubernetes clusters.

Adding Arc to Kubernetes

That latest release is perhaps the most interesting, as it brings aspects of Microsoft’s cloud-native Kubernetes tools to Kubernetes running anywhere. Although the management aspects of Azure Arc are comparable to Google’s Anthos, it’s a much less prescriptive approach

Think of a fog computing node as a physical server that resides between the edge devices (thermostats, robots, in-vehicle computers) and the back-end systems, typically hosted on public clouds. The fog nodes respond to an architectural problem: too much latency to pass requests all the way back to the public cloud-based services and not enough horsepower to process the data in the edge device itself.

This three-tier system adds another compute platform that is able to do some—if not most—of the back-end processing. This addresses the concern that cheaper edge devices with lower power don’t have the processing and storage

Much has been said about the challenges of managing a multi-cloud environment, as more organizations deploy various cloud services from different vendors. One key aspect of this management challenge is how to handle all the contracts that come with using multiple cloud providers and services.

“Not all cloud contracts are reviewed and negotiated using the same internal processes and procedures,” said Adam Mansfield, a practice leader at UpperEdge, an advisory firm that helps organizations with sourcing, negotiation, legal and program management issues.

“Some cloud contracts, driven by the cloud vendor’s ability to circumvent a client’s process, are reviewed and executed