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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.
- 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.
- Microsoft Entra ID: 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 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 (CD): Every change is automatically built, tested, and kept ready for release, with a human approving the final push to production. Continuous Deployment goes one step further and releases to production automatically, with no manual gate.
- 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 Microsoft Entra ID that provides Azure services with an automatically managed identity for authenticating to any service that supports Microsoft Entra 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.
Written byAlvin Varughese
Founder•20 professional certifications