The vocabulary, defined properly
Every term gets a plain explanation, a technical one and an example, because the same question is asked by people with very different backgrounds.
What is the DevOpsArk glossary?
The DevOpsArk glossary defines 24 terms from DevOps, Kubernetes, observability, security and cloud operations, each in plain language and in full.
A to Z
Agentic AI
Agentic AI describes software that decides for itself which steps to take towards a goal, rather than executing a sequence written out in advance.
AIOps
AIOps is the application of statistical and machine learning techniques to operational data for detection, correlation and noise reduction.
Anomaly detection
Anomaly detection identifies measurements that deviate significantly from a metric learned normal behaviour, rather than comparing against a fixed threshold.
Blue/green deployment
A blue/green deployment runs the new version as a parallel environment, verifies it, then switches all traffic at once. Reverting is the same switch back.
Canary deployment
A canary deployment releases a new version to a small share of production traffic first, increasing that share only if measured health stays within threshold.
Cardinality
Cardinality is the number of distinct combinations of label values for a metric, and it is the primary driver of metric storage cost.
Configuration drift
Configuration drift is the divergence between the state a system was declared to have and the state it actually has, caused by out-of-band changes.
Containerization
Containerization packages an application together with its dependencies into an image that runs identically on any machine with a compatible container runtime.
Continuous delivery
Continuous delivery is the practice of keeping software in a state where any change that has passed verification could be released to production at any time.
DevOps
DevOps is a way of working in which the people who build software share responsibility for running it, with automation that makes small change safe.
DevSecOps
DevSecOps is the practice of integrating security verification into the software delivery process rather than applying it as a separate review at the end.
Distributed tracing
Distributed tracing follows one request across every service it touches, recording the duration and outcome of each step so you see where time went.
GitOps
GitOps is an operating model in which a system desired state is declared in Git and an automated process continuously reconciles the running system to it.
Infrastructure as code
Infrastructure as code is the practice of defining infrastructure in versioned, machine-readable files rather than configuring it by hand.
Kubernetes
Kubernetes is an open-source system that runs containerised applications across a group of machines, keeping the running state matched to a declared one.
Monitoring
Monitoring is the practice of collecting predefined signals from a system and alerting when they leave their expected ranges.
Observability
Observability is the property of a system that allows its internal state to be understood from the signals it emits, including for failures nobody anticipated.
OpenTelemetry
OpenTelemetry is a vendor-neutral standard and set of libraries for generating and exporting metrics, logs and traces, portable across backends.
Platform engineering
Platform engineering is the discipline of building internal products that make it straightforward for product teams to build, ship and operate software.
Service level objective
A service level objective is a target for a measurable, user-visible property of a service, such as the share of requests that succeed over a period.
Shift left
Shift left means moving a verification activity earlier in the delivery process so problems are found while they are still cheap to fix.
Site reliability engineering
Site reliability engineering applies software engineering to operations, using reliability objectives and error budgets to balance stability and speed.
Software bill of materials
A software bill of materials is a machine-readable inventory of every component and dependency contained in a piece of software, including versions.
Vulnerability management
Vulnerability management is the continuous process of identifying security weaknesses, ranking them by real risk, fixing them and verifying the fix.
Prefer a structured route through these?
Learning tracks arrange the glossary and the articles into an ordered path per discipline.