Key terms and definitions used across platform engineering, DevOps, and cloud-native ecosystems.
ArgoCD — A declarative, GitOps continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes that automatically syncs application state from Git repositories.
Backstage — An open-source developer portal framework created by Spotify. It provides a unified frontend for infrastructure tooling, services, and documentation via a software catalog and plugin system.
Bicep — A domain-specific language (DSL) from Microsoft for deploying Azure resources declaratively. It's a transparent abstraction over ARM templates.
CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery) — Practices that automate building, testing, and deploying code. CI merges and validates changes frequently; CD automates the release pipeline.
Cloud-Native — An approach to building and running applications that exploits the advantages of cloud computing delivery models. Typically involves containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs.
Cortex — An internal developer portal that helps engineering teams catalog, score, and improve their services with standards and scorecards.
Dagger — A programmable CI/CD engine that lets you define pipelines as code in your language of choice, running in containers for full portability.
DevOps — A set of practices, tools, and a cultural philosophy that automates and integrates the processes between software development and IT operations teams.
DevSecOps — An extension of DevOps that integrates security practices into every phase of the software development lifecycle, rather than treating security as an afterthought.
Flux — A set of continuous and progressive delivery solutions for Kubernetes that are open and extensible, built to work with GitOps principles.
GitOps — An operational framework that takes DevOps best practices used for application development and applies them to infrastructure automation. Git is the single source of truth for declarative infrastructure and applications.
Golden Path — A recommended, well-supported way for developers to accomplish a common task (e.g., deploy a service, create a database) using the internal developer platform.
Grafana — An open-source analytics and interactive visualization platform. It provides charts, graphs, and alerts for monitoring infrastructure and applications.
Helm — A package manager for Kubernetes that helps you define, install, and upgrade complex Kubernetes applications using reusable charts.
Humanitec — A platform orchestrator that dynamically generates app and infrastructure configurations based on context, enabling true self-service for developers.
IaC (Infrastructure as Code) — The practice of managing and provisioning infrastructure through machine-readable definition files rather than manual processes. Examples: Terraform, Bicep, Pulumi.
IDP (Internal Developer Platform) — A self-service layer built by platform teams that provides developers with everything they need to build, deploy, and operate applications independently. Examples: Backstage, Port, Cortex.
Kubernetes (K8s) — An open-source container orchestration system that automates deploying, scaling, and managing containerized applications.
kubectl — The command-line tool for interacting with Kubernetes clusters.
Observability — The ability to measure the internal states of a system by examining its outputs (logs, metrics, traces). It goes beyond traditional monitoring by enabling you to ask new questions about system behavior.
OpenTofu — An open-source fork of Terraform, maintained by the Linux Foundation, that provides an alternative to HashiCorp's BSL-licensed Terraform.
Platform Engineering — The discipline of designing and building self-service toolchains and workflows that enable software engineering organizations to ship software faster and more reliably. Platform engineers build internal developer platforms as products for their developer customers.
Platform Team — A dedicated team responsible for building and maintaining the internal developer platform, treating developers as their customers.
Policy as Code — The practice of defining and managing organizational policies through code, enabling automated enforcement of compliance, security, and operational rules.
Port — An internal developer portal that lets teams create self-service experiences for developers with a customizable UI and workflow automation.
Prometheus — An open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit designed for reliability, using a dimensional time-series data model.
Pulumi — An IaC tool that lets you define infrastructure using general-purpose programming languages (TypeScript, Python, Go, C#) instead of domain-specific languages.
Self-Service — The ability for developers to provision resources, deploy applications, and perform operational tasks independently, without filing tickets or waiting for another team.
Service Mesh — A dedicated infrastructure layer for managing service-to-service communication, typically providing traffic management, security, and observability. Examples: Istio, Linkerd.
SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) — A discipline that applies software engineering principles to infrastructure and operations problems, focused on creating scalable and reliable systems.
Terraform — An open-source IaC tool by HashiCorp that lets you define infrastructure across cloud providers using a declarative configuration language (HCL).
Toil — Repetitive, manual, automatable operational work that scales linearly with service size. Platform engineering aims to eliminate toil.
VCluster — A virtual Kubernetes cluster running inside a host cluster, enabling multi-tenancy and isolated development environments.