The below glossary covers a wide range of terms related to DevOps practices, principles, and technologies, providing a comprehensive reference for individuals and organizations seeking to understand and adopt DevOps methodologies.
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- Agile: A software development methodology that emphasizes iterative development, collaboration between cross-functional teams, and adaptive planning.
- Automation: The use of technology to perform tasks with minimal human intervention, allowing for faster and more consistent software delivery.
- Blue-Green Deployment: A deployment strategy where two identical production environments, “blue” and “green,” are alternately used for deploying updates. This allows for zero-downtime deployments and easy rollback if issues occur.
- CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment): Practices that automate the process of integrating code changes into a shared repository (CI) and then deploying them to production environments (CD). This enables frequent and reliable software releases.
- Configuration Management: The process of managing and maintaining the configuration settings of software and infrastructure components to ensure consistency and reliability across environments.
- Containerization: Packaging software into standardized units called containers, along with their dependencies, to ensure consistency across different computing environments and facilitate deployment.
- Deployment Pipeline: An automated process that moves code changes through various stages of testing and deployment, typically including stages such as build, test, and deploy.
- DevOps: A cultural and organizational approach that emphasizes collaboration, communication, and integration between development (Dev) and operations (Ops) teams to deliver high-quality software faster and more efficiently.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): The practice of managing and provisioning computing infrastructure through machine-readable definition files, rather than manual configuration. This enables infrastructure to be treated as code and version-controlled.
- Microservices: Architectural style where an application is composed of small, independent services that can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently. This promotes modularity, flexibility, and scalability in software development.
- Monitoring: The process of observing and collecting data about the performance, availability, and behavior of systems and applications to identify issues and optimize performance.
- Orchestration: The automated coordination and management of multiple software components, containers, or services to ensure they work together efficiently and reliably.
- Release Management: The process of planning, scheduling, coordinating, and controlling the deployment of software releases across environments, ensuring smooth and reliable delivery.
- Scalability: The ability of a system to handle an increasing amount of workload by adding resources or distributing the workload across multiple nodes, without sacrificing performance.
- Site Reliability Engineering (SRE): A discipline that applies software engineering principles to the design, deployment, and operation of large-scale, reliable systems. SRE aims to balance reliability and velocity through automation, monitoring, and error budgeting.
- Source Control Management (SCM): The practice of managing changes to source code, documents, or any collection of files. It involves version control, branching, merging, and collaboration features to facilitate software development.
- Test Automation: The use of software tools and scripts to automate the execution of tests, including unit tests, integration tests, and acceptance tests. Test automation helps improve efficiency, repeatability, and reliability of testing processes.
- Version Control: The practice of tracking and managing changes to source code and other files. Version control systems (e.g., Git, SVN) enable developers to collaborate, track changes, and maintain a history of revisions to codebases.
- Zero-Downtime Deployment: A deployment strategy that ensures continuous availability of a service or application during updates or changes, minimizing or eliminating downtime for end users.
- Immutable Infrastructure: A concept where infrastructure components are replaced rather than updated or modified directly. This ensures consistency, reliability, and reproducibility of infrastructure configurations and reduces the risk of configuration drift.
- Chaos Engineering: The practice of intentionally introducing controlled chaos into systems to uncover weaknesses, failures, or vulnerabilities. Chaos engineering helps organizations build more resilient and reliable systems by testing their failure modes.
- Infrastructure Orchestration: The automated management and provisioning of infrastructure resources, such as virtual machines, containers, and networks, to support the deployment and operation of applications.
- Release Automation: The use of automation tools and practices to streamline and accelerate the process of releasing software updates, from development through testing to deployment.
- Service Level Agreement (SLA): A contractual agreement between a service provider and a customer that defines the expected level of service, including performance, availability, and support commitments.
- Security as Code: The practice of integrating security controls and best practices into the software development lifecycle through automation and code-based configurations. Security as code aims to improve security posture, compliance, and resilience against threats.
- Continuous Monitoring: The practice of continuously monitoring systems, applications, and infrastructure to detect and respond to security threats, performance issues, or anomalies in real-time.
- Infrastructure Provisioning: The process of automatically creating, configuring, and deploying infrastructure resources, such as servers, networks, and storage, to support application deployment and operations.
- Infrastructure Monitoring: The ongoing process of monitoring and analyzing the performance, availability, and health of infrastructure components, such as servers, networks, and databases, to ensure optimal operation and identify potential issues.
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): A cloud computing model where virtualized infrastructure resources, such as servers, storage, and networking, are provided as a service over the internet, allowing users to provision and manage them on-demand.
- Platform as a Service (PaaS): A cloud computing model where a platform with development tools, runtime environments, and infrastructure components is provided as a service, allowing developers to build, deploy, and manage applications without worrying about underlying infrastructure.
- Serverless Computing: A cloud computing execution model where cloud providers dynamically manage the allocation and scaling of resources, allowing developers to focus on writing and deploying code without managing servers or infrastructure.
- Continuous Improvement: The ongoing process of making incremental and iterative improvements to processes, tools, and practices based on feedback, metrics, and lessons learned. Continuous improvement is a core principle of DevOps culture.
- Feature Flag: A toggle or configuration setting that allows developers to control the visibility and behavior of features or changes in a software application. Feature flags enable gradual rollout, experimentation, and rollback of features without deploying new code.
- Infrastructure Automation: The use of automation tools and scripts to provision, configure, and manage infrastructure resources, such as servers, networks, and storage, to support application deployment and operations.
- Release Candidate: A version of a software application that is considered stable and ready for deployment to production environments after undergoing testing and validation. Release candidates are often subjected to final rounds of testing before being released to end users.
- Self-Service Portal: A web-based interface or portal that allows users, such as developers or IT administrators, to request and provision infrastructure resources, services, or applications on-demand without manual intervention.
- Shift-Left Testing: The practice of integrating testing activities earlier in the software development lifecycle, such as during the development and design phases, to identify and address issues sooner and improve overall software quality.
- Versioning: The process of assigning unique identifiers or numbers to different versions of software artifacts, such as code, libraries, or configuration files, to track changes, manage dependencies, and facilitate collaboration.
- Waterfall Model: A traditional software development methodology characterized by sequential phases, such as requirements analysis, design, implementation, testing, and deployment, with limited feedback loops and opportunities for iteration.
- XaaS (Anything as a Service): A generic term that refers to various cloud computing services and resources delivered over the internet as a service, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS).