Glossary of DevOps terms and acronyms
This is a curated list of terms and acronyms in the field of DevOps and cloud engineering.
Ansible
Ansible is a configuration management tool with Infrastructure as Code capabilities. See https://ansible.com
see also: Configuration Management, Infrastructure as Code
Amazon Web Services
also known as: AWS
AWS or Amazon Web Services is the most widely used cloud platform and IaaS provider in the world.
Individual AWS services include, for example: EC2, EKS, ECS
Configuration Drift
Configuration Drift is the difference between the assumed configuration of your infrastructure and/or applications, and their actual current state.
Configuration Drift causes uncertainty in Continuous Delivery pipelines.
Lack of Infrastructure as Code or Configuration Management practices contribute to Configuration Drift.
see also: Infrastructure as Code, Configuration Management
Configuration Management
Configuration management is a concept for managing server and application configuration as code.
see also: Infrastructure as Code
Continuous Delivery
also known as: CD
Continuous Delivery is a software delivery methodology where changes are shipped to production frequently and in small increments.
Continuous Delivery is enabled by the confidence of knowing that your common code branch (usually known as the ‘master’ branch) could be deployed to production at any given point in time. It implies you have a way of automatically testing and rejecting changes that would break your production environment.
see also: Continuous Deployment
Continuous Deployment
Continuous Deployment is taking Continuous Delivery a step further, meaning every valid code change will be deployed to production automatically.
see also: Continuous Delivery
Continuous Integration
also known as: CI
Continuous Integration is the concept of testing code changes automatically, and merging passed changes in a common master branch. This cycle should be completed at least daily by every developer.
Continuous Integration is a prerequisite for any Continuous Delivery pipeline.
see also: Continuous Delivery
DevOps
DevOps is a methodology and a way of working that emphasizes shared responsibilities in a software delivery organization.
see also: Continuous Delivery
DevOps Engineer
A DevOps engineer is a person who implements DevOps on a technical level.
see also: DevOps
EC2
also known as: AWS EC2, Elastic Computing Cloud
The Amazon Web Services Elastic Computing Cloud, or EC2, is one of the fundamental building blocks of the AWS ecosystem.
EC2 is used to create and manage virtual machines in the Amazon Web Services cloud platform.
see also: AWS
ECS
also known as: AWS ECS, Elastic Container Service
The Amazon Web Services Elastic Container Service, or ECS, is a proprietary cloud orchestration platform in AWS.
ECS can be used to run containerised application environments across multiple EC2 virtual machines, or Fargate.
See: https://aws.amazon.com/ecs/
see also: AWS
EKS
also known as: AWS EKS, Elastic Kubernetes Service
The Amazon Web Services Elastic Kubernetes Service, or EKS, is the managed Kubernetes service on AWS.
EKS can be used to build and manage Kubernetes clusters that are running on either EC2 or Fargate.
See: https://aws.amazon.com/eks/
see also: AWS, Kubernetes
Fargate
also known as: AWS Fargate
AWS Fargate is an abstraction that enables software development teams to run container workloads without managing virtual machines or servers.
When used with EKS or ECS, Fargate manages the underlying virtualised server resources for the user, effectively removing the need to spin up EC2 instances to run containers on.
See: https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/
Infrastructure as Code
also known as: IaC
Infrastructure as Code is a way of managing IT infrastructure by defining all resources as code.
see also: Configuration Management, Terraform
Kubernetes
also known as: K8s
Kubernetes is one of the most widely-used container orchestration platforms. Kubernetes can be used to run container workloads in modern cloud platforms as well as traditional datacenters.
Terraform
Terraform is one of the most popular tools for building Infrastructure as Code in modern cloud environments. See https://www.terraform.io
see also: Infrastructure as Code