🔑 Key points
- Computer science is full of acronyms.
- Learn to speak like a pro.
As with any branch of computer science, we like to throw around a lot of technical sounding terms that are wrapped up in cryptic acronyms. This is certainly true of Quality Assurance (QA) and DevOps. DevOps itself is an obfuscation of the term developer operations, which is a combination of software development skills and application management operations. You don't need to know the details of each of these terms, but you should be familiar with all of them. It is highly likely that you will encounter them in a professional setting.
| Acronym | Term | Description |
|---|---|---|
| QA | Quality Assurance | Making sure that the product does what the company wants it to do. |
| CI | Continuous Integration | Automating the testing, building, and packaging of an application. |
| CD | Continuous Deployment or Continuous Delivery | Automating the process of preparing and application for release (Deployment), or actually releasing it (Delivery). |
| IaC | Infrastructure as Code | Treating your application infrastructure creation and management as just another part of your application code. |
| SRE | Site Reliability Engineering | The implementation of DevOps principles in order to keep a website up and running. |
| CF | Continuous Feedback | Automating metrics and logs such that there is real time observability of the application. |
| VCS | Version Control System | Historical tracking of application changes that allows for branching, roll back, and annotation. |
| VM | Virtual Machine | A software program that simulates a physical machine environment. Multiple isolated VMs can run on a single physical machine. |
| Container | Container | A lightweight virtualization of a operating system environment that is easily deployable from an small image. |
| OCI | Open Container Initiative | The official standard for creating and hosting containers. |
| AWS | Amazon Web Services | The company that popularized cloud based service hosting. |
| IAM | Identity and Access Management | The rigorous definition of who, or what, can access what, when, and from where. |
| DDoS | Distributed Denial of Service | Overwhelming a website with requests such that it can no longer properly operate. |
| DNS | Domain Name System | Mapping website hostnames to server IP addresses. |
| HTTP | Hypertext Transfer Protocol | The protocol for communicating on the World Wide Web. |
| HTTPS | Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure | Encrypted version of HTTP. |
| TDD | Test-Driven Development | Using the creation of automated tests to enhance and expedite code development. |
| SLA | Service Level Agreement | A public contractual that specifies requirements for metrics like uptime and latency. |
| SLO | Service Level Objective | An internal declaration of key metrics that the service targets. |
| SLI | Service Level Indicator | A key metric that defines the success of a service. |