IT/DevOps English — Free Cloud, CI/CD & ITIL Terminology

Cloud service model terminology defines the three primary ways organizations consume cloud resources. Understanding the English distinctions between these models is critical for cloud certification exams and architecture discussions.

• IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) — virtual machines, storage, networking managed by the provider; OS and applications managed by the customer (e.g., AWS EC2, Azure VMs)
• PaaS (Platform as a Service) — runtime environment, middleware and OS managed by the provider; customer manages only applications and data (e.g., Heroku, Google App Engine)
• SaaS (Software as a Service) — fully managed applications delivered over the internet; customer manages only user access and configuration (e.g., Salesforce, Microsoft 365)
• FaaS (Function as a Service) — serverless execution model where code runs in response to events without managing servers (e.g., AWS Lambda, Azure Functions)

Containerization and orchestration terminology covers the English vocabulary for packaging, deploying and scaling applications using containers. This vocabulary is essential for the CKA and CKAD exams.

• Containerization — Docker image, Dockerfile, container runtime, registry, layer caching
• Kubernetes objects — pod, node, cluster, deployment, service, ingress, namespace
• Configuration — ConfigMap, Secret, persistent volume, persistent volume claim
• Orchestration tools — Helm chart, kubectl, Kustomize, Operator pattern
• Advanced patterns — sidecar, init container, service mesh (Istio, Linkerd)

CI/CD pipeline terminology covers the English vocabulary for automating the build, test and deployment of software. GitOps extends this by using Git repositories as the single source of truth for declarative infrastructure and application definitions.

• CI/CD pipeline — build stage, test stage, deploy stage, artifact, pipeline trigger
• Deployment strategies — blue-green deployment, canary release, rolling update, A/B testing
• Release management — feature flag, release train, hotfix, rollback, version pinning
• GitOps — declarative configuration, reconciliation loop, drift detection, ArgoCD, Flux
• Tools — Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, Tekton

Observability terminology covers the three pillars of system understanding: metrics, logs and traces. SRE and DevOps teams use this vocabulary when configuring monitoring dashboards, setting up alerts and debugging production issues.

• Metrics — latency, throughput, error rate, saturation, golden signals
• Logging — structured logging, log aggregation, log levels (DEBUG, INFO, WARN, ERROR)
• Tracing — distributed tracing, span, trace ID, correlation ID, OpenTelemetry
• Alerting — alert threshold, alert fatigue, on-call rotation, escalation policy, PagerDuty
• APM tools — Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, ELK Stack, Jaeger

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) terminology covers the English vocabulary for defining, provisioning and managing cloud infrastructure through code. This vocabulary is critical for cloud architect roles and for passing AWS, Azure and GCP infrastructure certification exams.

• Terraform — provider, resource, data source, module, state file, plan, apply, backend
• Ansible — playbook, role, task, handler, inventory, fact, vault, idempotency
• AWS CloudFormation — stack, template, change set, nested stack, drift detection
• Key concepts — immutable infrastructure, infrastructure drift, desired state configuration

ITIL v4 terminology covers the English vocabulary used in IT Service Management frameworks. This vocabulary is essential for the ITIL v4 Foundation certification exam and for communicating within IT service management teams in global organizations.

• Service value system — guiding principles, governance, service value chain, practices, continual improvement
• Key practices — incident management, problem management, change enablement, service request management
• Service level management — SLA, SLO, SLI, service catalog, operational level agreement (OLA)
• Four dimensions — organizations and people, information and technology, partners and suppliers, value streams and processes

During a production incident, clear English communication can mean the difference between a 10-minute and a 2-hour outage. Non-native speakers must quickly understand and use terms like severity escalation, blast radius, customer impact, rollback, hotfix and status page update. Termify teaches the exact vocabulary used in incident Slack channels, PagerDuty alerts and bridge calls at companies like Google, Amazon and Netflix.

• Declaring an incident — "We are declaring a SEV-1 incident for the payment service"
• Impact assessment — "The blast radius affects 12% of users in the EU region"
• Resolution action — "Initiating a rollback to the last known good deployment"
• Post-mortem summary — "Root cause was a misconfigured auto-scaling policy"

Deployment meetings require precise English to discuss release schedules, risk assessments and rollback plans. Teams must communicate about canary deployment percentages, feature flag configurations, database migration scripts and change approval processes. Termify covers the terminology used in deployment runbooks, change advisory board (CAB) meetings and release coordination channels.

• Release readiness — "All integration tests pass; canary is at 5% with no error spike"
• Risk assessment — "This change modifies the database schema; requires a maintenance window"
• Rollback criteria — "If error rate exceeds 0.5% we will trigger an automatic rollback"
• Post-deployment validation — "Smoke tests passed; monitoring dashboards show nominal metrics"

Architecture reviews demand the ability to present, critique and document technical designs in English. Professionals discuss trade-offs between microservices and monoliths, evaluate consistency models, analyze cost implications and write Architecture Decision Records (ADRs). Termify teaches the vocabulary used in design documents, Requests for Comment (RFCs) and technical review meetings.

• Design proposals — "We propose a microservices architecture with an API gateway for rate limiting"
• Trade-off analysis — "Eventual consistency reduces latency but increases complexity in conflict resolution"
• Scalability discussion — "Horizontal scaling with auto-scaling groups behind an application load balancer"
• Cost analysis — "Reserved instances reduce compute costs by 40% compared to on-demand pricing"

Writing clear technical documentation in English is a core skill for IT/DevOps professionals. Runbooks must be precise enough for an on-call engineer to follow at 3 AM during an outage. API documentation must be unambiguous for developers in different time zones. Termify teaches the vocabulary and patterns used in production runbooks, API reference documentation, troubleshooting guides and onboarding documents.

• Runbook entry — "Prerequisites: kubectl access, VPN connection to production cluster"
• API documentation — "Endpoint returns HTTP 429 when rate limit is exceeded; retry after X seconds"
• Troubleshooting step — "Check pod logs with kubectl logs; verify ConfigMap values match expected configuration"
• Architecture diagram label — "Load balancer distributes traffic across three availability zones"