{"head":{"title":"Software and AI Glossary: Plain-English Terms | OceanLab","description":"145 software, LLM, AI and compliance terms explained in plain English, each with an example, common mistakes and related guides.","canonical":"https://oceanlab.in/glossary"},"crumbs":[{"name":"Home","path":"/"},{"name":"Glossary","path":"/glossary"}],"count":145,"letters":[{"letter":"A","terms":[{"href":"/glossary/ab-test","name":"A/B test","term":"A/B test","short":"An experiment that shows two versions of something to random groups of users and measures which one does better on a chosen metric."},{"href":"/glossary/acceptance-criteria","name":"acceptance criteria","term":"Acceptance criteria","short":"The testable conditions a feature must meet before the person who asked for it accepts it as done."},{"href":"/glossary/accessibility-audit","name":"accessibility audit","term":"Accessibility audit","short":"A structured review of a website or app against an accessibility standard, usually WCAG, to find what blocks disabled people from using it."},{"href":"/glossary/ai-agent","name":"AI agent","term":"AI agent","short":"Software where a language model decides which steps to take and which tools to call, in a loop, to reach a goal."},{"href":"/glossary/aml","name":"AML","term":"AML (anti-money laundering)","short":"The laws, checks and controls that stop criminals from moving or hiding illegal money through financial services."},{"href":"/glossary/aoc","name":"AOC","term":"AOC (attestation of compliance)","short":"The official PCI SSC form a merchant or service provider signs to attest to the results of its PCI DSS assessment."},{"href":"/glossary/api-gateway","name":"API gateway","term":"API gateway","short":"A single entry point that sits in front of a system's APIs and handles routing, auth and limits for every request."},{"href":"/glossary/apm","name":"APM","term":"APM (application performance monitoring)","short":"Tools that measure how fast and how reliably an application handles requests, and show which part of the code or which call is slow."},{"href":"/glossary/audit-log","name":"audit log","term":"Audit log","short":"A record of who did what in a system, when and from where, kept so actions can be traced later."},{"href":"/glossary/audit-trail","name":"audit trail","term":"Audit trail","short":"A secure, time-stamped history of who created, changed or deleted a record, kept so the record can be trusted later."},{"href":"/glossary/autoscaling","name":"autoscaling","term":"Autoscaling","short":"Automatically adding or removing computing capacity, such as servers or containers, as the load on a system goes up or down."}]},{"letter":"B","terms":[{"href":"/glossary/baa","name":"BAA","term":"BAA (business associate agreement)","short":"The contract HIPAA requires between a covered entity and a vendor that creates, receives, keeps or sends its PHI."},{"href":"/glossary/backlog","name":"backlog","term":"Backlog (product backlog)","short":"The ordered list of everything still to be built or fixed in a product, with the most important work at the top."},{"href":"/glossary/batch-api","name":"batch API","term":"Batch API","short":"A way to send many LLM requests to run later, usually at a discount."},{"href":"/glossary/blue-green-deployment","name":"blue-green deployment","term":"Blue-green deployment","short":"A release method that runs two identical production environments and switches all traffic from the old one to the new one in one step."},{"href":"/glossary/business-associate","name":"business associate","term":"Business associate (HIPAA)","short":"A person or company that creates, receives, keeps or sends protected health information on behalf of a HIPAA covered entity."}]},{"letter":"C","terms":[{"href":"/glossary/canary-release","name":"canary release","term":"Canary release","short":"A release method that sends a small share of users to a new version first, watches for problems, and widens the rollout step by step."},{"href":"/glossary/cardholder-data-environment","name":"cardholder data environment","term":"Cardholder data environment (CDE)","short":"The people, processes and systems that store, process or transmit payment card data, plus the systems connected to them."},{"href":"/glossary/cdn","name":"CDN","term":"CDN (content delivery network)","short":"A network of servers around the world that keeps copies of your files close to users, so pages and media load faster."},{"href":"/glossary/change-request","name":"change request","term":"Change request","short":"A written request to change the agreed scope of a project, with its effect on cost and timeline agreed before work starts."},{"href":"/glossary/chargeback","name":"chargeback","term":"Chargeback","short":"A forced reversal of a card payment, started by the cardholder's bank after the cardholder disputes the charge."},{"href":"/glossary/ci-cd","name":"CI/CD","term":"CI/CD (continuous integration and delivery)","short":"An automated pipeline that builds and tests every code change (CI) and then releases it to users in a repeatable way (CD)."},{"href":"/glossary/clickable-prototype","name":"clickable prototype","term":"Clickable prototype","short":"A set of linked screens you can click through, built to test a design before the real software exists."},{"href":"/glossary/cold-start","name":"cold start","term":"Cold start","short":"The extra delay when a serverless function or a new server instance has to start up before it can handle a request."},{"href":"/glossary/conformity-assessment","name":"conformity assessment","term":"Conformity assessment","short":"The process of showing that a product meets the EU rules that apply to it before it is placed on the market."},{"href":"/glossary/connection-pooling","name":"connection pooling","term":"Connection pooling","short":"Keeping a set of open database connections and sharing them across requests, instead of opening a new connection for each one."},{"href":"/glossary/container","name":"container","term":"Container (software)","short":"A package that holds an application and everything it needs to run, isolated from other software on the same machine."},{"href":"/glossary/context-window","name":"context window","term":"Context window","short":"The most tokens a model can take in and produce in one request."},{"href":"/glossary/covered-entity","name":"covered entity","term":"Covered entity (HIPAA)","short":"Under HIPAA, a health plan, a healthcare clearinghouse, or a healthcare provider that sends health information electronically in standard transactions."}]},{"letter":"D","terms":[{"href":"/glossary/data-controller","name":"data controller","term":"Data controller (GDPR)","short":"Under the GDPR, the organisation that decides why and how personal data is processed, alone or jointly with others."},{"href":"/glossary/data-processor","name":"data processor","term":"Data processor (GDPR)","short":"Under the GDPR, an organisation that processes personal data on behalf of a controller and only on its documented instructions."},{"href":"/glossary/data-residency","name":"data residency","term":"Data residency","short":"Where data is physically stored and processed, and the laws or contracts that say where it may and may not go."},{"href":"/glossary/data-subject-request","name":"data subject request","term":"Data subject request (DSR)","short":"A request from a person to use one of their GDPR rights over their personal data, such as access, correction, deletion or a copy to take elsewhere."},{"href":"/glossary/data-warehouse","name":"data warehouse","term":"Data warehouse","short":"A database built for analysis and reporting, where cleaned data from many systems is kept together in one place."},{"href":"/glossary/definition-of-done","name":"definition of done","term":"Definition of done (DoD)","short":"The shared checklist every piece of work must pass, such as tested, reviewed and deployed, before the team calls it finished."},{"href":"/glossary/design-system","name":"design system","term":"Design system","short":"A shared set of reusable components, styles and usage rules that designers and engineers both build screens from."},{"href":"/glossary/discovery-phase","name":"discovery phase","term":"Discovery phase","short":"The short stretch before a build where the team works out the problem, the users, the scope and the rough cost."},{"href":"/glossary/double-entry","name":"double entry","term":"Double-entry bookkeeping","short":"Recording every transaction as equal debits and credits in at least two accounts, so the books always balance."},{"href":"/glossary/dpa","name":"DPA","term":"DPA (data processing agreement)","short":"The contract the GDPR requires between a data controller and a processor that handles personal data for it."},{"href":"/glossary/dpia","name":"DPIA","term":"DPIA (data protection impact assessment)","short":"An assessment the GDPR requires before processing personal data in ways likely to put people's rights at high risk."}]},{"letter":"E","terms":[{"href":"/glossary/edge-function","name":"edge function","term":"Edge function","short":"A small piece of server code that runs on a CDN's servers around the world, close to the user, instead of in one central region."},{"href":"/glossary/egress","name":"egress","term":"Egress (data transfer out)","short":"Data that leaves a cloud provider's network, such as files sent to users, which many providers bill per gigabyte."},{"href":"/glossary/ehr","name":"EHR","term":"EHR (electronic health record)","short":"A digital record of a patient's health and care that is built to be shared with other providers, so it can follow the patient."},{"href":"/glossary/e-signature","name":"e-signature","term":"Electronic signature (e-signature)","short":"A way of signing a document or approving a record electronically, so it carries the signer's intent the way a handwritten signature would."},{"href":"/glossary/embedding","name":"embedding","term":"Embedding (vector embedding)","short":"A list of numbers that represents the meaning of a piece of text, an image or other data, so that similar items have similar numbers."},{"href":"/glossary/emr","name":"EMR","term":"EMR (electronic medical record)","short":"The digital version of a clinician's paper chart: a patient's medical and treatment history kept within one practice."},{"href":"/glossary/encryption-at-rest","name":"encryption at rest","term":"Encryption at rest","short":"Encrypting stored data, such as databases, files and backups, so it cannot be read without the key."},{"href":"/glossary/encryption-in-transit","name":"encryption in transit","term":"Encryption in transit","short":"Encrypting data while it moves between systems, usually with TLS, so it cannot be read or changed on the way."},{"href":"/glossary/ephi","name":"ePHI","term":"ePHI (electronic protected health information)","short":"Protected health information that is stored or sent in electronic form, which is what the HIPAA Security Rule protects."},{"href":"/glossary/etl","name":"ETL","term":"ETL (extract, transform, load)","short":"A data pipeline that pulls data out of source systems, cleans and reshapes it, and loads it into a destination such as a data warehouse."},{"href":"/glossary/event-driven-architecture","name":"event-driven architecture","term":"Event-driven architecture","short":"A way of designing software where parts of the system publish events about what happened, and other parts react to them on their own."}]},{"letter":"F","terms":[{"href":"/glossary/feature-flag","name":"feature flag","term":"Feature flag","short":"A switch in the code that turns a feature on or off for chosen users at runtime, without deploying new code."},{"href":"/glossary/fhir","name":"FHIR","term":"FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources)","short":"A standard from HL7 for exchanging health data through modern web APIs, built from small, defined pieces called resources."},{"href":"/glossary/fine-tuning","name":"fine-tuning","term":"Fine-tuning","short":"Training an existing model further on your own examples so it behaves the way you want, such as following a format, tone or task more reliably."},{"href":"/glossary/fixed-price","name":"fixed-price contract","term":"Fixed-price contract","short":"A contract where the price for an agreed scope is set up front."}]},{"letter":"G","terms":[{"href":"/glossary/guardrails","name":"guardrails","term":"Guardrails (AI)","short":"Checks placed around an AI model that block, fix or flag unsafe, off-topic or incorrect inputs and outputs."},{"href":"/glossary/gxp","name":"GxP","term":"GxP (good practice regulations)","short":"The family of good practice rules, such as manufacturing (GMP), clinical (GCP) and laboratory (GLP) practice, that regulated life sciences work must follow."}]},{"letter":"H","terms":[{"href":"/glossary/hallucination","name":"hallucination","term":"Hallucination (AI)","short":"When an AI model produces information that is false or made up, presented as if it were true."},{"href":"/glossary/handover","name":"handover","term":"Handover (software handover)","short":"Moving the code, accounts, documents and know-how of a product from the team that built it to the team that will run it."},{"href":"/glossary/headless-commerce","name":"headless commerce","term":"Headless commerce","short":"An e-commerce setup where the shop front (the head) is built separately from the commerce engine that handles products, carts and orders, linked by APIs."},{"href":"/glossary/high-fidelity-prototype","name":"high fidelity prototype","term":"High fidelity prototype","short":"A prototype that looks almost exactly like the finished product, with final styling, real content and realistic interactions."},{"href":"/glossary/high-risk-ai-system","name":"high-risk AI system","term":"High-risk AI system (EU AI Act)","short":"An AI system the EU AI Act places in its high-risk class, which brings extra duties before and after it is placed on the market."},{"href":"/glossary/hl7","name":"HL7","term":"HL7 (Health Level Seven)","short":"The standards body behind major health data standards, and the common name for its Version 2 messages that hospital systems use to exchange data."},{"href":"/glossary/human-in-the-loop","name":"human-in-the-loop","term":"Human-in-the-loop (HITL)","short":"A design where a person reviews, corrects or approves what an AI system produces before it takes effect."}]},{"letter":"I","terms":[{"href":"/glossary/iaas","name":"IaaS","term":"IaaS (infrastructure as a service)","short":"Renting raw computing, storage and networking from a cloud provider, while you manage everything that runs on it."},{"href":"/glossary/idempotency","name":"idempotency","term":"Idempotency","short":"The property of an operation that has the same effect whether it runs once or several times, so it is safe to retry."},{"href":"/glossary/inference","name":"inference","term":"Inference (AI)","short":"Running a trained AI model on new input to get an output, such as an answer, a label or an embedding."},{"href":"/glossary/infrastructure-as-code","name":"infrastructure as code","term":"Infrastructure as code (IaC)","short":"Defining servers, networks, databases and other cloud resources in code files that are versioned and applied automatically, instead of setting them up by hand."},{"href":"/glossary/interchange","name":"interchange","term":"Interchange fee","short":"The fee the merchant's bank pays the card-issuing bank on each card payment, usually the largest part of what a merchant pays to accept cards."},{"href":"/glossary/ip-assignment","name":"IP assignment","term":"IP assignment","short":"The part of a contract that transfers ownership of code, designs and other work from the people who made them to the client."}]},{"letter":"K","terms":[{"href":"/glossary/kubernetes","name":"Kubernetes","term":"Kubernetes (K8s)","short":"An open source platform that runs and manages containers across a group of machines: starting them, restarting them, scaling them and routing traffic to them."},{"href":"/glossary/kyb","name":"KYB","term":"KYB (know your business)","short":"Checking a business customer: that it legally exists, who owns and controls it, and how risky it is."},{"href":"/glossary/kyc","name":"KYC","term":"KYC (know your customer)","short":"The checks a regulated business runs to confirm a customer is who they say they are and to judge the risk they pose."}]},{"letter":"L","terms":[{"href":"/glossary/lawful-basis","name":"lawful basis","term":"Lawful basis (GDPR)","short":"One of the six reasons listed in GDPR Article 6 that make processing personal data lawful, such as consent or a contract."},{"href":"/glossary/ledger","name":"ledger","term":"Ledger","short":"The record of every movement of money in a system, kept so that any balance can be explained entry by entry."},{"href":"/glossary/llm","name":"LLM","term":"LLM (large language model)","short":"An AI model trained on very large amounts of text that predicts the next piece of text, which lets it read, write and reason in language."},{"href":"/glossary/llm-evals","name":"LLM evals","term":"LLM evals (evaluations)","short":"Repeatable tests that score how well a model, prompt or AI feature does a specific task."},{"href":"/glossary/load-balancer","name":"load balancer","term":"Load balancer","short":"A service that spreads incoming traffic across several servers, and stops sending traffic to any that fail their health checks."}]},{"letter":"M","terms":[{"href":"/glossary/maker-checker","name":"maker-checker","term":"Maker-checker (four-eyes principle)","short":"A control where one person makes a change and a different person must approve it before it takes effect."},{"href":"/glossary/message-queue","name":"message queue","term":"Message queue","short":"A buffer that holds messages, such as tasks or events, until a worker is ready to process them, so the sender does not have to wait."},{"href":"/glossary/microservices","name":"microservices","term":"Microservices","short":"A way of building an application as many small services, each owning one job and its own data, deployed independently."},{"href":"/glossary/milestone","name":"milestone","term":"Milestone","short":"A checkpoint in a project where an agreed piece of work is delivered, checked and, often, paid for."},{"href":"/glossary/minimum-necessary","name":"minimum necessary","term":"Minimum necessary (HIPAA)","short":"The HIPAA rule that covered entities and business associates should use, share or request only the PHI needed for the purpose at hand."},{"href":"/glossary/model-routing","name":"model routing","term":"Model routing","short":"Sending each AI request to the model best suited to it, instead of using one model for everything."},{"href":"/glossary/multi-tenancy","name":"multi-tenancy","term":"Multi-tenancy","short":"One running copy of a software product serving many customers, called tenants, with each tenant's data kept apart."},{"href":"/glossary/mvp","name":"MVP","term":"MVP (minimum viable product)","short":"The smallest version of a product that real users can use, built to test whether the core idea works."}]},{"letter":"O","terms":[{"href":"/glossary/oauth","name":"OAuth","term":"OAuth 2.0","short":"A standard that lets an app get limited access to a user's account on another service, without ever seeing their password."},{"href":"/glossary/object-storage","name":"object storage","term":"Object storage","short":"A way of storing files as objects in buckets, each with an ID and metadata, reached over HTTP and built to scale to huge amounts of data cheaply."},{"href":"/glossary/observability","name":"observability","term":"Observability","short":"How well you can understand what a running system is doing, and why, from the data it gives off: logs, metrics and traces."},{"href":"/glossary/offline-first","name":"offline-first","term":"Offline-first","short":"A way of building apps so they work fully without a network connection, saving changes on the device and syncing them when a connection returns."},{"href":"/glossary/open-banking","name":"open banking","term":"Open banking","short":"Letting customers give licensed third-party apps access to their bank account data, or let them start payments, through secure bank APIs."},{"href":"/glossary/open-source-license","name":"open source license","term":"Open source license","short":"The terms under which open source code may be used, changed and shared, including what you owe in return."}]},{"letter":"P","terms":[{"href":"/glossary/paas","name":"PaaS","term":"PaaS (platform as a service)","short":"Cloud hosting where you deploy your own application and the provider runs the servers, operating system and runtime underneath."},{"href":"/glossary/pci-scope","name":"PCI scope","term":"PCI scope","short":"Every system, person and process that PCI DSS applies to, because it handles card data or can reach systems that do."},{"href":"/glossary/penetration-test","name":"penetration test","term":"Penetration test (pen test)","short":"An authorised, simulated attack on a system by security testers, to find weaknesses that a real attacker could use."},{"href":"/glossary/pep","name":"PEP","term":"PEP (politically exposed person)","short":"Someone who holds or held a prominent public role, or a family member or close associate of one, treated as higher risk for corruption."},{"href":"/glossary/phi","name":"PHI","term":"PHI (protected health information)","short":"Health information that can identify a person and is created or held by a HIPAA covered entity or its business associate."},{"href":"/glossary/product-roadmap","name":"product roadmap","term":"Product roadmap","short":"A plan showing what a product team intends to build over the coming months, and the goal behind each step."},{"href":"/glossary/prompt-caching","name":"prompt caching","term":"Prompt caching","short":"Reusing the processed start of a prompt across calls, so repeated input is billed at a lower rate."},{"href":"/glossary/proof-of-concept","name":"proof of concept","term":"Proof of concept (PoC)","short":"A small, often throwaway build that tests whether one risky technical idea can work at all."},{"href":"/glossary/pwa","name":"PWA","term":"PWA (progressive web app)","short":"A web app built with standard web technology that can be installed on a device and work offline, giving an experience close to a native app."}]},{"letter":"R","terms":[{"href":"/glossary/rag","name":"RAG","term":"RAG (retrieval-augmented generation)","short":"A pattern that finds relevant passages from your own data and gives them to a language model along with the question, so it answers from your content."},{"href":"/glossary/rate-limiting","name":"rate limiting","term":"Rate limiting","short":"Capping how many requests a user, API key or address can make in a given time, to protect a system and share capacity fairly."},{"href":"/glossary/rbac","name":"RBAC","term":"RBAC (role-based access control)","short":"An access model where permissions are attached to roles, and people get access by being given a role."},{"href":"/glossary/read-replica","name":"read replica","term":"Read replica","short":"A read-only copy of a database that is kept in sync with the main database and takes read queries off it."},{"href":"/glossary/reconciliation","name":"reconciliation","term":"Reconciliation","short":"Checking that two records of the same money agree, such as your ledger and the bank or provider's statement, and explaining every difference."},{"href":"/glossary/retainer","name":"retainer","term":"Retainer (software retainer)","short":"An ongoing agreement where a client pays each month to reserve a set amount of a team's time."},{"href":"/glossary/rpo","name":"RPO","term":"RPO (recovery point objective)","short":"The point in time to which data must be recoverable after an outage: in practice, how much recent data you can afford to lose."},{"href":"/glossary/rto","name":"RTO","term":"RTO (recovery time objective)","short":"How long a system can stay down after a failure before the outage seriously harms the business."}]},{"letter":"S","terms":[{"href":"/glossary/saas","name":"SaaS","term":"SaaS (software as a service)","short":"Software you use over the internet, usually by subscription, while the provider runs the application and everything under it."},{"href":"/glossary/samd","name":"SaMD","term":"SaMD (software as a medical device)","short":"Software meant for one or more medical purposes that does that job on its own, without being part of a hardware medical device."},{"href":"/glossary/saml","name":"SAML","term":"SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language)","short":"An open XML standard, SAML 2.0 from OASIS, that lets a company's identity provider vouch for a user when they log in to another app."},{"href":"/glossary/sanctions-screening","name":"sanctions screening","term":"Sanctions screening","short":"Checking customers, counterparties and payments against government sanctions lists before letting money move."},{"href":"/glossary/saq","name":"SAQ","term":"SAQ (self-assessment questionnaire)","short":"The PCI DSS form that eligible merchants and service providers use to document the results of their own assessment."},{"href":"/glossary/scope-creep","name":"scope creep","term":"Scope creep","short":"The slow growth of what a project must deliver, without a matching change to its time or budget."},{"href":"/glossary/serverless","name":"serverless","term":"Serverless","short":"A cloud model where the provider runs your code on demand and manages the servers, and you pay for what you use rather than for idle machines."},{"href":"/glossary/settlement","name":"settlement","term":"Settlement (payments)","short":"The point when money for a payment actually moves into the receiver's account, after the payment was approved and cleared."},{"href":"/glossary/sharding","name":"sharding","term":"Sharding","short":"Splitting one large dataset across several databases, called shards, by a key such as customer ID, so each shard holds only part of the data."},{"href":"/glossary/sla","name":"SLA","term":"SLA (service level agreement)","short":"A contract that promises a level of service, such as uptime or support response time, and says what happens if it is missed."},{"href":"/glossary/slo","name":"SLO","term":"SLO (service level objective)","short":"An internal reliability target for a service, such as 99.9% of requests succeeding, measured by a service level indicator (SLI)."},{"href":"/glossary/soc-2-type-ii","name":"SOC 2 Type II","term":"SOC 2 Type II","short":"An independent audit report on whether a service organisation's controls were designed well and worked over a period of time."},{"href":"/glossary/source-code-escrow","name":"source code escrow","term":"Source code escrow","short":"An arrangement where a vendor's source code is held by a neutral third party and released to the customer if agreed events happen."},{"href":"/glossary/sprint","name":"sprint","term":"Sprint","short":"A fixed time box, one month or less and often two weeks, in which a team builds and shows a working piece of the product."},{"href":"/glossary/sso","name":"SSO","term":"SSO (single sign-on)","short":"One login, managed by an identity provider, that gives a person access to many separate apps."},{"href":"/glossary/statement-of-work","name":"statement of work","term":"Statement of work (SOW)","short":"The document that sets out what a supplier will deliver, by when, for how much, and how the work will be accepted."},{"href":"/glossary/strong-customer-authentication","name":"strong customer authentication","term":"Strong customer authentication (SCA)","short":"The EU rule under PSD2 that online payments and account access must be confirmed with two independent factors from different categories."},{"href":"/glossary/structured-output","name":"structured output","term":"Structured output","short":"Getting a language model to reply in a fixed, machine-readable format, such as JSON that matches a schema you define."}]},{"letter":"T","terms":[{"href":"/glossary/technical-debt","name":"technical debt","term":"Technical debt","short":"The future cost of shortcuts taken in code today."},{"href":"/glossary/temperature","name":"temperature","term":"Temperature (LLM setting)","short":"A setting that controls how random a language model's output is: lower is more predictable, higher is more varied."},{"href":"/glossary/time-and-materials","name":"time and materials","term":"Time and materials (T&M)","short":"A contract where you pay for the hours actually worked, at agreed rates."},{"href":"/glossary/token","name":"token","term":"Token (LLM)","short":"The unit an AI language model reads and writes, and the unit most LLM APIs bill by."},{"href":"/glossary/tokenization","name":"tokenization","term":"Tokenization (payments)","short":"Replacing a card number or other sensitive value with a stand-in token that cannot be turned back into the original without the token service."},{"href":"/glossary/tool-calling","name":"tool calling","term":"Tool calling (function calling)","short":"A way for a language model to ask your application to run a defined function and give it the result."},{"href":"/glossary/total-cost-of-ownership","name":"total cost of ownership","term":"Total cost of ownership (TCO)","short":"Everything a piece of software costs over its life, not just the price to build or buy it."},{"href":"/glossary/travel-rule","name":"travel rule","term":"Travel rule","short":"A rule that requires details of the sender and the recipient to travel with certain transfers of money or crypto-assets between financial institutions."}]},{"letter":"U","terms":[{"href":"/glossary/uptime","name":"uptime","term":"Uptime","short":"The share of time a service is working and reachable, usually written as a percentage such as 99.9%."},{"href":"/glossary/usability-testing","name":"usability testing","term":"Usability testing","short":"Watching real people try to complete real tasks with a product, to find where they get stuck."},{"href":"/glossary/user-story","name":"user story","term":"User story","short":"A short description of a feature from the point of view of the person who needs it, and why they need it."}]},{"letter":"V","terms":[{"href":"/glossary/vector-database","name":"vector database","term":"Vector database","short":"A database built to store embeddings and quickly find the ones closest to a query vector."},{"href":"/glossary/velocity","name":"velocity","term":"Velocity","short":"The amount of finished work a team completes in a sprint, used to forecast how much fits in the time left."},{"href":"/glossary/vendor-lock-in","name":"vendor lock-in","term":"Vendor lock-in","short":"When leaving a supplier, platform or tool would cost so much time or money that you are effectively stuck with it."},{"href":"/glossary/vpat","name":"VPAT","term":"VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template)","short":"A free template from the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) for reporting how well a product meets accessibility standards."}]},{"letter":"W","terms":[{"href":"/glossary/wcag-2-2","name":"WCAG 2.2","term":"WCAG 2.2","short":"The version of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines published as a Recommendation on 5 October 2023, with nine new success criteria."},{"href":"/glossary/webhook","name":"webhook","term":"Webhook","short":"An HTTP request one system sends to a URL you choose as soon as an event happens, so you do not have to keep asking."},{"href":"/glossary/wireframe","name":"wireframe","term":"Wireframe","short":"A simple, usually grey, sketch of a screen showing layout, content and actions, without final styling."}]}],"categories":[{"id":"buying","label":"Buying software","intro":"Contracts, scope and the real cost of a build.","terms":[{"href":"/glossary/change-request","name":"change request","term":"Change request","short":"A written request to change the agreed scope of a project, with its effect on cost and timeline agreed before work starts."},{"href":"/glossary/clickable-prototype","name":"clickable prototype","term":"Clickable prototype","short":"A set of linked screens you can click through, built to test a design before the real software exists."},{"href":"/glossary/fixed-price","name":"fixed-price contract","term":"Fixed-price contract","short":"A contract where the price for an agreed scope is set up front."},{"href":"/glossary/handover","name":"handover","term":"Handover (software handover)","short":"Moving the code, accounts, documents and know-how of a product from the team that built it to the team that will run it."},{"href":"/glossary/ip-assignment","name":"IP assignment","term":"IP assignment","short":"The part of a contract that transfers ownership of code, designs and other work from the people who made them to the client."},{"href":"/glossary/mvp","name":"MVP","term":"MVP (minimum viable product)","short":"The smallest version of a product that real users can use, built to test whether the core idea works."},{"href":"/glossary/open-source-license","name":"open source license","term":"Open source license","short":"The terms under which open source code may be used, changed and shared, including what you owe in return."},{"href":"/glossary/paas","name":"PaaS","term":"PaaS (platform as a service)","short":"Cloud hosting where you deploy your own application and the provider runs the servers, operating system and runtime underneath."},{"href":"/glossary/retainer","name":"retainer","term":"Retainer (software retainer)","short":"An ongoing agreement where a client pays each month to reserve a set amount of a team's time."},{"href":"/glossary/saas","name":"SaaS","term":"SaaS (software as a service)","short":"Software you use over the internet, usually by subscription, while the provider runs the application and everything under it."},{"href":"/glossary/source-code-escrow","name":"source code escrow","term":"Source code escrow","short":"An arrangement where a vendor's source code is held by a neutral third party and released to the customer if agreed events happen."},{"href":"/glossary/statement-of-work","name":"statement of work","term":"Statement of work (SOW)","short":"The document that sets out what a supplier will deliver, by when, for how much, and how the work will be accepted."},{"href":"/glossary/technical-debt","name":"technical debt","term":"Technical debt","short":"The future cost of shortcuts taken in code today."},{"href":"/glossary/time-and-materials","name":"time and materials","term":"Time and materials (T&M)","short":"A contract where you pay for the hours actually worked, at agreed rates."},{"href":"/glossary/total-cost-of-ownership","name":"total cost of ownership","term":"Total cost of ownership (TCO)","short":"Everything a piece of software costs over its life, not just the price to build or buy it."},{"href":"/glossary/vendor-lock-in","name":"vendor lock-in","term":"Vendor lock-in","short":"When leaving a supplier, platform or tool would cost so much time or money that you are effectively stuck with it."}]},{"id":"delivery","label":"Running a build","intro":"How software gets scoped, designed, planned and shipped.","terms":[{"href":"/glossary/acceptance-criteria","name":"acceptance criteria","term":"Acceptance criteria","short":"The testable conditions a feature must meet before the person who asked for it accepts it as done."},{"href":"/glossary/backlog","name":"backlog","term":"Backlog (product backlog)","short":"The ordered list of everything still to be built or fixed in a product, with the most important work at the top."},{"href":"/glossary/definition-of-done","name":"definition of done","term":"Definition of done (DoD)","short":"The shared checklist every piece of work must pass, such as tested, reviewed and deployed, before the team calls it finished."},{"href":"/glossary/design-system","name":"design system","term":"Design system","short":"A shared set of reusable components, styles and usage rules that designers and engineers both build screens from."},{"href":"/glossary/discovery-phase","name":"discovery phase","term":"Discovery phase","short":"The short stretch before a build where the team works out the problem, the users, the scope and the rough cost."},{"href":"/glossary/high-fidelity-prototype","name":"high fidelity prototype","term":"High fidelity prototype","short":"A prototype that looks almost exactly like the finished product, with final styling, real content and realistic interactions."},{"href":"/glossary/milestone","name":"milestone","term":"Milestone","short":"A checkpoint in a project where an agreed piece of work is delivered, checked and, often, paid for."},{"href":"/glossary/product-roadmap","name":"product roadmap","term":"Product roadmap","short":"A plan showing what a product team intends to build over the coming months, and the goal behind each step."},{"href":"/glossary/proof-of-concept","name":"proof of concept","term":"Proof of concept (PoC)","short":"A small, often throwaway build that tests whether one risky technical idea can work at all."},{"href":"/glossary/scope-creep","name":"scope creep","term":"Scope creep","short":"The slow growth of what a project must deliver, without a matching change to its time or budget."},{"href":"/glossary/sprint","name":"sprint","term":"Sprint","short":"A fixed time box, one month or less and often two weeks, in which a team builds and shows a working piece of the product."},{"href":"/glossary/usability-testing","name":"usability testing","term":"Usability testing","short":"Watching real people try to complete real tasks with a product, to find where they get stuck."},{"href":"/glossary/user-story","name":"user story","term":"User story","short":"A short description of a feature from the point of view of the person who needs it, and why they need it."},{"href":"/glossary/velocity","name":"velocity","term":"Velocity","short":"The amount of finished work a team completes in a sprint, used to forecast how much fits in the time left."},{"href":"/glossary/wireframe","name":"wireframe","term":"Wireframe","short":"A simple, usually grey, sketch of a screen showing layout, content and actions, without final styling."}]},{"id":"reliability","label":"Reliability","intro":"Uptime, recovery and the promises made about them.","terms":[{"href":"/glossary/rpo","name":"RPO","term":"RPO (recovery point objective)","short":"The point in time to which data must be recoverable after an outage: in practice, how much recent data you can afford to lose."},{"href":"/glossary/rto","name":"RTO","term":"RTO (recovery time objective)","short":"How long a system can stay down after a failure before the outage seriously harms the business."},{"href":"/glossary/sla","name":"SLA","term":"SLA (service level agreement)","short":"A contract that promises a level of service, such as uptime or support response time, and says what happens if it is missed."},{"href":"/glossary/slo","name":"SLO","term":"SLO (service level objective)","short":"An internal reliability target for a service, such as 99.9% of requests succeeding, measured by a service level indicator (SLI)."},{"href":"/glossary/uptime","name":"uptime","term":"Uptime","short":"The share of time a service is working and reachable, usually written as a percentage such as 99.9%."}]},{"id":"llm-costs","label":"LLM costs","intro":"How model usage is measured, billed and brought down.","terms":[{"href":"/glossary/batch-api","name":"batch API","term":"Batch API","short":"A way to send many LLM requests to run later, usually at a discount."},{"href":"/glossary/context-window","name":"context window","term":"Context window","short":"The most tokens a model can take in and produce in one request."},{"href":"/glossary/inference","name":"inference","term":"Inference (AI)","short":"Running a trained AI model on new input to get an output, such as an answer, a label or an embedding."},{"href":"/glossary/model-routing","name":"model routing","term":"Model routing","short":"Sending each AI request to the model best suited to it, instead of using one model for everything."},{"href":"/glossary/prompt-caching","name":"prompt caching","term":"Prompt caching","short":"Reusing the processed start of a prompt across calls, so repeated input is billed at a lower rate."},{"href":"/glossary/token","name":"token","term":"Token (LLM)","short":"The unit an AI language model reads and writes, and the unit most LLM APIs bill by."}]},{"id":"ai","label":"AI building blocks","intro":"The parts that AI features in software are made of.","terms":[{"href":"/glossary/ai-agent","name":"AI agent","term":"AI agent","short":"Software where a language model decides which steps to take and which tools to call, in a loop, to reach a goal."},{"href":"/glossary/embedding","name":"embedding","term":"Embedding (vector embedding)","short":"A list of numbers that represents the meaning of a piece of text, an image or other data, so that similar items have similar numbers."},{"href":"/glossary/fine-tuning","name":"fine-tuning","term":"Fine-tuning","short":"Training an existing model further on your own examples so it behaves the way you want, such as following a format, tone or task more reliably."},{"href":"/glossary/guardrails","name":"guardrails","term":"Guardrails (AI)","short":"Checks placed around an AI model that block, fix or flag unsafe, off-topic or incorrect inputs and outputs."},{"href":"/glossary/hallucination","name":"hallucination","term":"Hallucination (AI)","short":"When an AI model produces information that is false or made up, presented as if it were true."},{"href":"/glossary/human-in-the-loop","name":"human-in-the-loop","term":"Human-in-the-loop (HITL)","short":"A design where a person reviews, corrects or approves what an AI system produces before it takes effect."},{"href":"/glossary/llm","name":"LLM","term":"LLM (large language model)","short":"An AI model trained on very large amounts of text that predicts the next piece of text, which lets it read, write and reason in language."},{"href":"/glossary/llm-evals","name":"LLM evals","term":"LLM evals (evaluations)","short":"Repeatable tests that score how well a model, prompt or AI feature does a specific task."},{"href":"/glossary/rag","name":"RAG","term":"RAG (retrieval-augmented generation)","short":"A pattern that finds relevant passages from your own data and gives them to a language model along with the question, so it answers from your content."},{"href":"/glossary/structured-output","name":"structured output","term":"Structured output","short":"Getting a language model to reply in a fixed, machine-readable format, such as JSON that matches a schema you define."},{"href":"/glossary/temperature","name":"temperature","term":"Temperature (LLM setting)","short":"A setting that controls how random a language model's output is: lower is more predictable, higher is more varied."},{"href":"/glossary/tool-calling","name":"tool calling","term":"Tool calling (function calling)","short":"A way for a language model to ask your application to run a defined function and give it the result."},{"href":"/glossary/vector-database","name":"vector database","term":"Vector database","short":"A database built to store embeddings and quickly find the ones closest to a query vector."}]},{"id":"compliance","label":"Compliance","intro":"Rules that change how regulated software is built.","terms":[{"href":"/glossary/audit-trail","name":"audit trail","term":"Audit trail","short":"A secure, time-stamped history of who created, changed or deleted a record, kept so the record can be trusted later."},{"href":"/glossary/baa","name":"BAA","term":"BAA (business associate agreement)","short":"The contract HIPAA requires between a covered entity and a vendor that creates, receives, keeps or sends its PHI."},{"href":"/glossary/business-associate","name":"business associate","term":"Business associate (HIPAA)","short":"A person or company that creates, receives, keeps or sends protected health information on behalf of a HIPAA covered entity."},{"href":"/glossary/cardholder-data-environment","name":"cardholder data environment","term":"Cardholder data environment (CDE)","short":"The people, processes and systems that store, process or transmit payment card data, plus the systems connected to them."},{"href":"/glossary/conformity-assessment","name":"conformity assessment","term":"Conformity assessment","short":"The process of showing that a product meets the EU rules that apply to it before it is placed on the market."},{"href":"/glossary/covered-entity","name":"covered entity","term":"Covered entity (HIPAA)","short":"Under HIPAA, a health plan, a healthcare clearinghouse, or a healthcare provider that sends health information electronically in standard transactions."},{"href":"/glossary/data-controller","name":"data controller","term":"Data controller (GDPR)","short":"Under the GDPR, the organisation that decides why and how personal data is processed, alone or jointly with others."},{"href":"/glossary/data-processor","name":"data processor","term":"Data processor (GDPR)","short":"Under the GDPR, an organisation that processes personal data on behalf of a controller and only on its documented instructions."},{"href":"/glossary/data-residency","name":"data residency","term":"Data residency","short":"Where data is physically stored and processed, and the laws or contracts that say where it may and may not go."},{"href":"/glossary/data-subject-request","name":"data subject request","term":"Data subject request (DSR)","short":"A request from a person to use one of their GDPR rights over their personal data, such as access, correction, deletion or a copy to take elsewhere."},{"href":"/glossary/dpa","name":"DPA","term":"DPA (data processing agreement)","short":"The contract the GDPR requires between a data controller and a processor that handles personal data for it."},{"href":"/glossary/dpia","name":"DPIA","term":"DPIA (data protection impact assessment)","short":"An assessment the GDPR requires before processing personal data in ways likely to put people's rights at high risk."},{"href":"/glossary/e-signature","name":"e-signature","term":"Electronic signature (e-signature)","short":"A way of signing a document or approving a record electronically, so it carries the signer's intent the way a handwritten signature would."},{"href":"/glossary/encryption-at-rest","name":"encryption at rest","term":"Encryption at rest","short":"Encrypting stored data, such as databases, files and backups, so it cannot be read without the key."},{"href":"/glossary/encryption-in-transit","name":"encryption in transit","term":"Encryption in transit","short":"Encrypting data while it moves between systems, usually with TLS, so it cannot be read or changed on the way."},{"href":"/glossary/ephi","name":"ePHI","term":"ePHI (electronic protected health information)","short":"Protected health information that is stored or sent in electronic form, which is what the HIPAA Security Rule protects."},{"href":"/glossary/gxp","name":"GxP","term":"GxP (good practice regulations)","short":"The family of good practice rules, such as manufacturing (GMP), clinical (GCP) and laboratory (GLP) practice, that regulated life sciences work must follow."},{"href":"/glossary/high-risk-ai-system","name":"high-risk AI system","term":"High-risk AI system (EU AI Act)","short":"An AI system the EU AI Act places in its high-risk class, which brings extra duties before and after it is placed on the market."},{"href":"/glossary/lawful-basis","name":"lawful basis","term":"Lawful basis (GDPR)","short":"One of the six reasons listed in GDPR Article 6 that make processing personal data lawful, such as consent or a contract."},{"href":"/glossary/maker-checker","name":"maker-checker","term":"Maker-checker (four-eyes principle)","short":"A control where one person makes a change and a different person must approve it before it takes effect."},{"href":"/glossary/minimum-necessary","name":"minimum necessary","term":"Minimum necessary (HIPAA)","short":"The HIPAA rule that covered entities and business associates should use, share or request only the PHI needed for the purpose at hand."},{"href":"/glossary/phi","name":"PHI","term":"PHI (protected health information)","short":"Health information that can identify a person and is created or held by a HIPAA covered entity or its business associate."},{"href":"/glossary/soc-2-type-ii","name":"SOC 2 Type II","term":"SOC 2 Type II","short":"An independent audit report on whether a service organisation's controls were designed well and worked over a period of time."}]},{"id":"fintech","label":"Payments and fintech","intro":"Money movement, card rules and financial crime checks.","terms":[{"href":"/glossary/aml","name":"AML","term":"AML (anti-money laundering)","short":"The laws, checks and controls that stop criminals from moving or hiding illegal money through financial services."},{"href":"/glossary/aoc","name":"AOC","term":"AOC (attestation of compliance)","short":"The official PCI SSC form a merchant or service provider signs to attest to the results of its PCI DSS assessment."},{"href":"/glossary/chargeback","name":"chargeback","term":"Chargeback","short":"A forced reversal of a card payment, started by the cardholder's bank after the cardholder disputes the charge."},{"href":"/glossary/double-entry","name":"double entry","term":"Double-entry bookkeeping","short":"Recording every transaction as equal debits and credits in at least two accounts, so the books always balance."},{"href":"/glossary/interchange","name":"interchange","term":"Interchange fee","short":"The fee the merchant's bank pays the card-issuing bank on each card payment, usually the largest part of what a merchant pays to accept cards."},{"href":"/glossary/kyb","name":"KYB","term":"KYB (know your business)","short":"Checking a business customer: that it legally exists, who owns and controls it, and how risky it is."},{"href":"/glossary/kyc","name":"KYC","term":"KYC (know your customer)","short":"The checks a regulated business runs to confirm a customer is who they say they are and to judge the risk they pose."},{"href":"/glossary/ledger","name":"ledger","term":"Ledger","short":"The record of every movement of money in a system, kept so that any balance can be explained entry by entry."},{"href":"/glossary/open-banking","name":"open banking","term":"Open banking","short":"Letting customers give licensed third-party apps access to their bank account data, or let them start payments, through secure bank APIs."},{"href":"/glossary/pci-scope","name":"PCI scope","term":"PCI scope","short":"Every system, person and process that PCI DSS applies to, because it handles card data or can reach systems that do."},{"href":"/glossary/pep","name":"PEP","term":"PEP (politically exposed person)","short":"Someone who holds or held a prominent public role, or a family member or close associate of one, treated as higher risk for corruption."},{"href":"/glossary/reconciliation","name":"reconciliation","term":"Reconciliation","short":"Checking that two records of the same money agree, such as your ledger and the bank or provider's statement, and explaining every difference."},{"href":"/glossary/sanctions-screening","name":"sanctions screening","term":"Sanctions screening","short":"Checking customers, counterparties and payments against government sanctions lists before letting money move."},{"href":"/glossary/saq","name":"SAQ","term":"SAQ (self-assessment questionnaire)","short":"The PCI DSS form that eligible merchants and service providers use to document the results of their own assessment."},{"href":"/glossary/settlement","name":"settlement","term":"Settlement (payments)","short":"The point when money for a payment actually moves into the receiver's account, after the payment was approved and cleared."},{"href":"/glossary/strong-customer-authentication","name":"strong customer authentication","term":"Strong customer authentication (SCA)","short":"The EU rule under PSD2 that online payments and account access must be confirmed with two independent factors from different categories."},{"href":"/glossary/tokenization","name":"tokenization","term":"Tokenization (payments)","short":"Replacing a card number or other sensitive value with a stand-in token that cannot be turned back into the original without the token service."},{"href":"/glossary/travel-rule","name":"travel rule","term":"Travel rule","short":"A rule that requires details of the sender and the recipient to travel with certain transfers of money or crypto-assets between financial institutions."}]},{"id":"architecture","label":"System design","intro":"How the parts of a product are split, connected and kept in step.","terms":[{"href":"/glossary/api-gateway","name":"API gateway","term":"API gateway","short":"A single entry point that sits in front of a system's APIs and handles routing, auth and limits for every request."},{"href":"/glossary/connection-pooling","name":"connection pooling","term":"Connection pooling","short":"Keeping a set of open database connections and sharing them across requests, instead of opening a new connection for each one."},{"href":"/glossary/data-warehouse","name":"data warehouse","term":"Data warehouse","short":"A database built for analysis and reporting, where cleaned data from many systems is kept together in one place."},{"href":"/glossary/etl","name":"ETL","term":"ETL (extract, transform, load)","short":"A data pipeline that pulls data out of source systems, cleans and reshapes it, and loads it into a destination such as a data warehouse."},{"href":"/glossary/event-driven-architecture","name":"event-driven architecture","term":"Event-driven architecture","short":"A way of designing software where parts of the system publish events about what happened, and other parts react to them on their own."},{"href":"/glossary/headless-commerce","name":"headless commerce","term":"Headless commerce","short":"An e-commerce setup where the shop front (the head) is built separately from the commerce engine that handles products, carts and orders, linked by APIs."},{"href":"/glossary/idempotency","name":"idempotency","term":"Idempotency","short":"The property of an operation that has the same effect whether it runs once or several times, so it is safe to retry."},{"href":"/glossary/message-queue","name":"message queue","term":"Message queue","short":"A buffer that holds messages, such as tasks or events, until a worker is ready to process them, so the sender does not have to wait."},{"href":"/glossary/microservices","name":"microservices","term":"Microservices","short":"A way of building an application as many small services, each owning one job and its own data, deployed independently."},{"href":"/glossary/multi-tenancy","name":"multi-tenancy","term":"Multi-tenancy","short":"One running copy of a software product serving many customers, called tenants, with each tenant's data kept apart."},{"href":"/glossary/offline-first","name":"offline-first","term":"Offline-first","short":"A way of building apps so they work fully without a network connection, saving changes on the device and syncing them when a connection returns."},{"href":"/glossary/pwa","name":"PWA","term":"PWA (progressive web app)","short":"A web app built with standard web technology that can be installed on a device and work offline, giving an experience close to a native app."},{"href":"/glossary/rate-limiting","name":"rate limiting","term":"Rate limiting","short":"Capping how many requests a user, API key or address can make in a given time, to protect a system and share capacity fairly."},{"href":"/glossary/read-replica","name":"read replica","term":"Read replica","short":"A read-only copy of a database that is kept in sync with the main database and takes read queries off it."},{"href":"/glossary/sharding","name":"sharding","term":"Sharding","short":"Splitting one large dataset across several databases, called shards, by a key such as customer ID, so each shard holds only part of the data."},{"href":"/glossary/webhook","name":"webhook","term":"Webhook","short":"An HTTP request one system sends to a URL you choose as soon as an event happens, so you do not have to keep asking."}]},{"id":"infrastructure","label":"Hosting and delivery","intro":"Where software runs, how it ships and how you watch it.","terms":[{"href":"/glossary/ab-test","name":"A/B test","term":"A/B test","short":"An experiment that shows two versions of something to random groups of users and measures which one does better on a chosen metric."},{"href":"/glossary/apm","name":"APM","term":"APM (application performance monitoring)","short":"Tools that measure how fast and how reliably an application handles requests, and show which part of the code or which call is slow."},{"href":"/glossary/autoscaling","name":"autoscaling","term":"Autoscaling","short":"Automatically adding or removing computing capacity, such as servers or containers, as the load on a system goes up or down."},{"href":"/glossary/blue-green-deployment","name":"blue-green deployment","term":"Blue-green deployment","short":"A release method that runs two identical production environments and switches all traffic from the old one to the new one in one step."},{"href":"/glossary/canary-release","name":"canary release","term":"Canary release","short":"A release method that sends a small share of users to a new version first, watches for problems, and widens the rollout step by step."},{"href":"/glossary/cdn","name":"CDN","term":"CDN (content delivery network)","short":"A network of servers around the world that keeps copies of your files close to users, so pages and media load faster."},{"href":"/glossary/ci-cd","name":"CI/CD","term":"CI/CD (continuous integration and delivery)","short":"An automated pipeline that builds and tests every code change (CI) and then releases it to users in a repeatable way (CD)."},{"href":"/glossary/cold-start","name":"cold start","term":"Cold start","short":"The extra delay when a serverless function or a new server instance has to start up before it can handle a request."},{"href":"/glossary/container","name":"container","term":"Container (software)","short":"A package that holds an application and everything it needs to run, isolated from other software on the same machine."},{"href":"/glossary/edge-function","name":"edge function","term":"Edge function","short":"A small piece of server code that runs on a CDN's servers around the world, close to the user, instead of in one central region."},{"href":"/glossary/egress","name":"egress","term":"Egress (data transfer out)","short":"Data that leaves a cloud provider's network, such as files sent to users, which many providers bill per gigabyte."},{"href":"/glossary/feature-flag","name":"feature flag","term":"Feature flag","short":"A switch in the code that turns a feature on or off for chosen users at runtime, without deploying new code."},{"href":"/glossary/iaas","name":"IaaS","term":"IaaS (infrastructure as a service)","short":"Renting raw computing, storage and networking from a cloud provider, while you manage everything that runs on it."},{"href":"/glossary/infrastructure-as-code","name":"infrastructure as code","term":"Infrastructure as code (IaC)","short":"Defining servers, networks, databases and other cloud resources in code files that are versioned and applied automatically, instead of setting them up by hand."},{"href":"/glossary/kubernetes","name":"Kubernetes","term":"Kubernetes (K8s)","short":"An open source platform that runs and manages containers across a group of machines: starting them, restarting them, scaling them and routing traffic to them."},{"href":"/glossary/load-balancer","name":"load balancer","term":"Load balancer","short":"A service that spreads incoming traffic across several servers, and stops sending traffic to any that fail their health checks."},{"href":"/glossary/object-storage","name":"object storage","term":"Object storage","short":"A way of storing files as objects in buckets, each with an ID and metadata, reached over HTTP and built to scale to huge amounts of data cheaply."},{"href":"/glossary/observability","name":"observability","term":"Observability","short":"How well you can understand what a running system is doing, and why, from the data it gives off: logs, metrics and traces."},{"href":"/glossary/serverless","name":"serverless","term":"Serverless","short":"A cloud model where the provider runs your code on demand and manages the servers, and you pay for what you use rather than for idle machines."}]},{"id":"security","label":"Identity and security","intro":"Logins, permissions and the checks that keep data safe.","terms":[{"href":"/glossary/audit-log","name":"audit log","term":"Audit log","short":"A record of who did what in a system, when and from where, kept so actions can be traced 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