Glossary
DevOps and cloud terms, explained plainly.
No circular definitions — each term explains what it actually means and why it matters, in plain English.
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CI/CD
CI/CD is the automated pipeline that tests and ships code — Continuous Integration runs tests on every change before it merges, and Continuous Delivery/Deployment automatically pushes tested code toward (or into) production instead of a person doing it by hand.
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DevSecOps
DevSecOps means building security checks directly into the CI/CD pipeline — dependency scanning, static analysis, secret detection — so vulnerabilities are caught before merge, instead of security being a separate review that happens right before (or after) release.
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FinOps
FinOps is the practice of managing cloud spend as a shared responsibility between engineering, finance, and leadership — using real-time cost data to make trade-offs, instead of finding out the bill was too high after the invoice arrives.
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GitOps
GitOps is an operating model where a Git repository is the single source of truth for infrastructure and deployments — an automated agent continuously syncs the live environment to match what's committed, instead of engineers running manual deploy commands.
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Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Infrastructure as Code means defining servers, networks, and cloud resources in version-controlled configuration files instead of clicking through a cloud provider's console — so infrastructure changes get the same review, history, and repeatability as application code.
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MLOps
MLOps applies DevOps discipline — version control, automated testing, CI/CD, monitoring — to machine learning systems, covering the parts that are unique to ML: versioning datasets and models, tracking experiments, and watching for a model's real-world accuracy quietly decaying over time.
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Observability
Observability is the ability to understand what's happening inside a system by examining what it outputs — metrics, logs, and traces — well enough to answer questions you didn't know you'd need to ask when you built it.
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Platform Engineering
Platform engineering is the practice of building internal tools and self-service workflows — a 'platform' — so application developers can provision infrastructure, deploy, and debug without filing a ticket to a separate ops team.
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SLO (Service Level Objective)
An SLO is a specific, measurable reliability target for a service — like '99.9% of requests succeed in under 300ms over a rolling 30 days' — that turns 'be reliable' into a number a team can actually track and make trade-offs against.
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SRE (Site Reliability Engineering)
SRE is a discipline that applies software-engineering practices to operations — using error budgets, SLOs, and blameless postmortems to make reliability a measurable, engineered property of a system rather than a matter of heroics during an incident.
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