Glossary

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Agile: An iterative approach to software development and project management that emphasizes flexibility, customer feedback, and rapid delivery.
AIOps: Application of artificial intelligence for IT operations, enhancing monitoring, incident response, and automation.
Ansible: An open-source automation tool for configuration management, application deployment, and task automation.
API (Application Programming Interface): A set of definitions and protocols for building and integrating application software.
AWS (Amazon Web Services): Amazon’s comprehensive cloud computing platform offering various services for computing, storage, and networking.
Azure: Microsoft’s cloud computing platform providing a wide range of cloud services.

Blue-Green Deployment: A deployment strategy using two identical environments to minimize downtime and risk.
Bare Metal: Physical servers without virtualization or containerization layers.

CI/CD: Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment - practices that automate software delivery processes.
CNAPP (Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform): Integrated security platform combining CSPM, CWPP, and KSPM capabilities for cloud-native applications.
CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management): Continuous monitoring and assessment of cloud infrastructure security posture.
Containerization: Packaging application code and dependencies together for consistent deployment across environments.
Configuration Drift: The phenomenon where deployed infrastructure diverges from its defined desired state.

Docker: A platform for developing, shipping, and running applications in containers.
DevOps: A set of practices combining software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to shorten development cycles and provide continuous delivery.
DevSecOps: Integration of security practices within DevOps processes.

Edge Computing: Distributed computing paradigm that brings computation and data storage closer to the location where it is needed.
Elasticity: The ability to automatically scale computing resources up or down based on demand.

Failover: Switching to a redundant system upon the failure of the primary system.
Feature Flag: A software development technique that turns functionality on/off without deploying new code.
FinOps: Cloud financial operations combining finance, technology, and business practices to manage and optimize cloud costs.
Flux: A GitOps tool for Kubernetes that ensures clusters are configured as specified in Git.

Git: A distributed version control system for tracking changes in source code.
GitOps: A way of implementing Continuous Deployment for cloud native applications using Git as the single source of truth.

HAProxy: An open-source load balancer and proxy server for TCP and HTTP-based applications.
Helm: A package manager for Kubernetes that helps manage Kubernetes applications.

IaC (Infrastructure as Code): Managing and provisioning infrastructure through code instead of manual processes.
Immutable Infrastructure: Infrastructure that is never modified after deployment; changes require new deployments.

Kubernetes: An open-source container orchestration platform for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
Kustomize: A Kubernetes native configuration management tool.

Load Balancer: A device or service that distributes network traffic across multiple servers.
LLMOps: Machine Learning Operations specifically focused on deploying and managing Large Language Models in production.
Logging: The practice of recording events, processes, and outputs in a system.

Microservices: An architectural style structuring an application as a collection of loosely coupled services.
Monitoring: The collection and analysis of data about system performance and behavior.

Observability: The ability to understand a system’s internal state from its external outputs.
OpenShift: Red Hat’s enterprise Kubernetes platform.
OpenTelemetry: Open-source observability framework for cloud-native software, combining metrics, traces, and logs.

Pipeline: An automated sequence of processes for delivering software from development to production.
Platform Engineering: The discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations.
Pod: The smallest deployable unit in Kubernetes that can contain one or more containers.

RBAC (Role-Based Access Control): A method of regulating access to resources based on roles of individual users.
Rolling Update: A deployment strategy that gradually replaces instances of the previous version with new versions.

SLA (Service Level Agreement): A commitment between a service provider and client about aspects of the service like performance and availability.
SRE (Site Reliability Engineering): A discipline that incorporates aspects of software engineering and applies them to infrastructure and operations problems.
SLSA (Supply Chain Levels for Software Artifacts): Security framework for ensuring software supply chain integrity.
Service Mesh: Infrastructure layer for facilitating service-to-service communications between microservices.

Terraform: An open-source Infrastructure as Code software tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently.
Toil: Manual, repetitive, and automatable work that scales linearly as a system grows.

VPC (Virtual Private Cloud): An isolated section of a cloud where you can launch resources in a defined virtual network.
Version Control: A system that records changes to files over time, enabling collaboration and rollback capabilities.

WebAssembly: Binary instruction format for stack-based virtual machines, enabling high-performance web applications.
Wasm: Shorthand for WebAssembly, used in edge computing and serverless contexts.

Zero Downtime Deployment: A deployment practice ensuring that service remains available during updates.
Zero Trust: A security concept requiring strict verification for every person and device trying to access resources.