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Phase 8: Glossary

  • A/B Testing: A method of comparing two versions of a webpage or app against each other to determine which one performs better.
  • Agent (Azure Pipelines): A computing infrastructure with installed agent software that runs one job at a time. Can be Microsoft-hosted or self-hosted.
  • Ansible: An open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool.
  • API Management (APIM): A hybrid, multi-cloud platform for publishing, securing, transforming, and monitoring APIs.
  • Application Insights: A feature of Azure Monitor, is an extensible Application Performance Management (APM) service for developers and DevOps professionals.
  • ARM Templates (Azure Resource Manager templates): JSON files that define the infrastructure and configuration for your project, enabling Infrastructure as Code.
  • Azure Active Directory (Azure AD): Microsoft's cloud-based identity and access management service.
  • Azure App Configuration: A service that provides a way to centrally manage application settings and feature flags.
  • Azure Artifacts: A service within Azure DevOps that provides universal package management for various package types like NuGet, npm, Maven, and Python.
  • Azure Automation State Configuration: A service built on PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) that provides configuration management for Azure and hybrid machines.
  • Azure Boards: A service within Azure DevOps for managing software projects, providing a rich set of capabilities including native support for Agile, Scrum, and Kanban processes.
  • Azure CLI: A cross-platform command-line tool for managing Azure resources.
  • Azure Container Registry (ACR): A managed, private Docker registry service based on the open-source Docker Registry 2.0.
  • Azure DevOps: A suite of services that provides an end-to-end solution for software development, including planning, development, delivery, and operations.
  • Azure Event Hubs: A big data streaming platform and event ingestion service that can receive and process millions of events per second.
  • Azure Functions: A serverless compute service that lets you run event-triggered code without having to explicitly provision or manage infrastructure.
  • Azure IoT Hub: A managed service, hosted in the cloud, that acts as a central message hub for bi-directional communication between your IoT application and the devices it manages.
  • Azure Key Vault: A cloud service for securely storing and accessing secrets, keys, and certificates.
  • Azure Pipelines: A service within Azure DevOps that automatically builds and tests code projects to make them available to others.
  • Azure Policy: A service in Azure that you use to create, assign, and manage policies that enforce different rules and effects over your resources.
  • Azure Repos: A service within Azure DevOps that provides Git repositories or Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) for source control of your code.
  • Azure Service Bus: A fully managed enterprise message broker with message queues and publish-subscribe topics.
  • Bicep: A domain-specific language (DSL) that uses declarative syntax to deploy Azure resources. It provides a transparent abstraction over ARM JSON.
  • Blue-Green Deployment: A deployment strategy where two identical production environments ("Blue" and "Green") are run, with traffic switched from the old to the new environment.
  • Branch Policies: Rules enforced on a Git branch to ensure code quality, such as requiring pull requests, successful builds, or code reviews before merging.
  • Canary Deployment: A deployment strategy where a new version is rolled out to a small subset of users to test its performance and stability before a full rollout.
  • Change Failure Rate: A DevOps metric that measures the percentage of deployments that cause a failure in production.
  • Chef: A configuration management tool that uses a pure-Ruby, domain-specific language (DSL) for writing system configuration "recipes".
  • Circuit Breaker: A design pattern used in modern software development to detect failures and prevent a failure from constantly recurring.
  • Code Churn: A metric that measures the frequency of changes to a codebase, indicating areas of high activity or potential instability.
  • Code Coverage: A measure used to describe the degree to which the source code of a program is executed when a particular test suite is run.
  • CodeQL: An advanced semantic code analysis engine used by GitHub to find security vulnerabilities in code.
  • Continuous Integration (CI): The practice of automatically building and testing code every time a team member commits changes to version control.
  • Continuous Delivery/Deployment (CD): The practice of automatically releasing code changes to a production or testing environment after the build stage.
  • Cycle Time: A DevOps metric that measures the time it takes for work to go from "in progress" to "completed".
  • Dead-letter queue (DLQ): A sub-queue that holds messages that cannot be delivered to any receiver, or messages that could not be processed.
  • Dependabot: A GitHub feature that automatically detects outdated or insecure dependencies in your projects and creates pull requests to update them.
  • Deployment Slots: A feature of Azure App Service that allows you to deploy an app to a non-production slot, then swap it into production with zero downtime.
  • Desired State Configuration (DSC): A management platform in PowerShell that enables you to manage your IT and development infrastructure with configuration as code.
  • DevSecOps: The practice of integrating security into every stage of the DevOps lifecycle.
  • Feature Flags (Toggles): A technique that allows you to turn features of your application on or off without deploying new code.
  • First Principles: The practice of breaking down complex problems into their most basic, fundamental truths to reason up from there.
  • Flaky Tests: Automated tests that produce inconsistent, non-deterministic results (sometimes passing, sometimes failing) without any changes to the code.
  • GitHub Actions: An automation platform that allows you to automate your build, test, and deployment pipeline right from GitHub.
  • GitHub Advanced Security (GHAS): A suite of security features for GitHub, including code scanning, secret scanning, and dependency review.
  • GitHub Flow: A lightweight, branch-based workflow that supports teams and projects where deployments are made regularly.
  • GitHub Packages: A software package hosting service that allows you to host your software packages privately or publicly and use them as dependencies in your projects.
  • Git LFS (Large File Storage): A Git extension for versioning large files by replacing them with text pointers inside Git, while storing the file contents on a remote server.
  • Hotfix: A critical bug fix that is urgently deployed to a production environment to address a severe issue.
  • IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service): A cloud computing model where a provider hosts the fundamental infrastructure components traditionally present in an on-premises data center.
  • Idempotency: The property of certain operations in mathematics and computer science that can be applied multiple times without changing the result beyond the initial application.
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC): The practice of managing and provisioning infrastructure through code instead of through manual processes.
  • Kusto Query Language (KQL): A powerful query language used to query large datasets in services like Azure Monitor Logs and Application Insights.
  • Lead Time: A DevOps metric that measures the total time from the initial idea or request for a feature to its delivery to the customer.
  • Managed Identity: A feature of Azure Active Directory that provides Azure services with an automatically managed identity for authenticating to any service that supports Azure AD authentication, without any credentials in your code.
  • Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR): A DevOps metric that measures the average time it takes to recover from a failure in production.
  • Mermaid: A JavaScript-based diagramming and charting tool that uses Markdown-inspired text definitions to create and modify diagrams dynamically.
  • PaaS (Platform as a Service): A cloud computing model where a third-party provider delivers hardware and software tools—usually those needed for application development—to users over the internet.
  • Package Feed: A repository for storing and sharing software packages, such as those in Azure Artifacts or GitHub Packages.
  • Personal Access Token (PAT): An alternative to using passwords for authentication to Azure DevOps or GitHub, often used for programmatic access.
  • Puppet: A configuration management tool that helps you manage and automate your infrastructure and complex workflows.
  • Pull Request (PR): A mechanism in Git for a developer to notify team members that they have completed a feature and are ready for their code to be reviewed and merged into the main branch.
  • Resource Group: A container in Azure that holds related resources for an Azure solution.
  • Ring Deployment: A deployment strategy where a new version is rolled out to a series of user groups ("rings"), starting with internal users and gradually expanding to a wider audience.
  • SaaS (Software as a Service): A software distribution model in which a third-party provider hosts applications and makes them available to customers over the Internet.
  • SAST (Static Application Security Testing): A type of security testing that analyzes an application's source code for security vulnerabilities without executing the code.
  • Scalar: A Git extension developed by Microsoft to optimize Git performance for massive repositories.
  • Semantic Versioning (SemVer): A versioning scheme that uses a three-part number (MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH) to convey the nature of changes in a release.
  • Service Connection: An object in Azure Pipelines that securely stores the information needed to connect to an external service, such as an Azure subscription or a GitHub repository.
  • Service Principal: An identity created for use with applications, hosted services, and automated tools to access Azure resources.
  • Shared Responsibility Model: A cloud security framework that dictates the security obligations of a cloud provider and its users to ensure accountability.
  • Statelessness: A design principle for services where no session information is retained by the service between requests.
  • Subscription (Azure): A logical container and billing unit for Azure resources.
  • Terraform: An open-source infrastructure as code tool by HashiCorp that allows you to define and provision infrastructure using a declarative configuration language.
  • Traceability: The ability to track the relationship between development artifacts, such as requirements, code changes, tests, and deployments.
  • Trunk-Based Development: A source-control branching model where developers collaborate on code in a single branch called "trunk" (or "main").
  • Variable Group: A collection of variables in Azure Pipelines that can be shared across multiple pipelines.
  • Webhook: An automated message sent from apps when something happens. It has a message (payload) which is sent to a unique URL.
  • YAML (YAML Ain't Markup Language): A human-readable data-serialization language that is commonly used for configuration files and in applications where data is being stored or transmitted.