Terminology
- API: Application Programming Interface - a way to interact with software from other software (rather than via a screen)
- Blast radius: the extent of systems affected by a fault
- CAB: Change Advisory Board - a change management group that is supposed to advise on service changes
- Enabling team: a team of experts that uplifts capabilities within other teams and detects capability gaps across multiple teams. Taken from Team Topologies.
- Error Budget: a budget (in seconds, minutes, or hours) of downtime that is acceptable for a given service. Used as part of an SRE approach.
- FaaS: Function as a Service
- Feature Friction: a term characterised by Matthew Skelton, this is the (usually increasing) “effort needed to add a feature non-invasively” (Michael Feathers). Sometimes (incorrectly) called Technical Debt.
- Gbit: Gigabit
- GB: Gigabyte
- IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service
- IoT: Internet of Things
- MB: Megabyte
- NIC: Network Interface Card
- Operability: a measure of how well something (such as software) works in a Production/Live system.
- PaaS: Platform as a Service
- RAM: Random Access Memory
- RAS model: the measures of operability used by IBM since the 1960s of Reliability, Availability, Serviceability
- RBAC: role-based access control
- Run Book: Collection of details about how a software system works in Production. Also known as System Operation Manual.
- SaaS: Software as a Service
- SRE: Site Reliability Engineering, and approach to reliability popularized by Google.
- SLA: Service Level Agreement
- TB: Terabyte
- UX: User Experience
- Zero-Day Vulnerability: a public security flaw announced with 0 days’ warning to vendors