The ultimate platform & portal glossary

Deterministic AI refers to systems where the same input will always produce consistent outputs and return predictable results.

Context engineering is the act of constructing information environments that provide the right amount of knowledge for LLMs to solve problems.

Prompt engineering is the practice of designing prompts, or structured instructions given to an LLM, to reliably generate accurate, useful results.

JQ is a Turing-complete language that is used as a lightweight and flexible command-line utility to parse, filter, transform, and process JSON data.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) designs software systems where different parts (or services) are used to build applications.

Change failure rate (CFR) is meant to indicate the stability of your website or application and serve as a measure of potential risks to that stability.

Code reuse refers to using existing code in new projects instead of writing it from scratch. This practice helps save time, avoid errors, and keep things consistent. It can be as simple as reusing a code block or as complex as integrating libraries or frameworks. As organizations and teams scale, code reuse is key to building easier-to-maintain systems, letting teams focus on creating new products and features.

DORA metrics are a set of four diagnostic criteria for determining the productivity, velocity, and efficiency of your software development teams.

Internal documentation is a collection of content that lives within an organization. This content is designed specifically for internal teams—like developers, platform engineers, and product managers. Unlike external (or customer-facing) documentation, which targets end-users and customers, internal documentation serves the people building and maintaining the platform. It’s the team roadmap, covering everything from technical specs to operational procedures.

Operational maturity represents the evolution of an organization’s practices in maintaining and enhancing the performance, reliability, and efficiency of its IT systems. This concept is pivotal in transitioning from reactive to proactive operations, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.

Explore Infrastructure as Code: Discover its benefits, challenges, and how it transforms IT operations.

The Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) model is a discipline that applies software engineering principles to IT operations to create scalable and highly reliable software systems.

An internal developer platform (IDP) comprises the tools and services that developers need to build, deploy and manage infrastructure and processes, in a simplified self-service capability form that reduces the cognitive load on developers and eliminates TicketOps.

Platform orchestration lets developers provision infrastructure and environments for application development, testing and QA. In this context, environments mean the applications, infrastructure, configuration, policies, pipelines, databases and more. 

Cookiecutter: An open-source tool that uses templates to streamline project setup, ensuring consistency and accelerating development

Backstage is an open source platform for building internal developer portals. Internal developer portals aim to provide the capabilities of an internal developer platform in an abstracted way, reducing cognitive load on developers, and increasing engineering teams’ efficiency and productivity.

An ephemeral environment is a disposable and customized computing environment that is temporarily created to run applications, perform tasks, or host services for a short duration.

Domain-Driven Design (DDD) is a software development approach that models software development based on the input from the domain it is meant to serve. This means the software's structure and language closely mirror the business domain. By understanding the domain, the model can address relevant problems and produce higher-quality applications.

A Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) platform is an automated tool that aggregates, analyzes and presents data and insights from the software development process. 

A software catalog is a centralized metadata repository that enables users to easily find and access application-related information such as ownership, versions, status, and more.

The C4 model is a framework for visualizing the architecture of software systems. Created by software architect Simon Brown, the framework is designed to help software developers, architects and other stakeholders understand and communicate the structure of software systems with different levels of detail and from various perspectives.

Developer self-service is a platform engineering practice that allows developers to independently access, manage and deploy the resources and tools they need.

Value Stream Management (VSM) is a set of software delivery practices that bring order to the process by visualizing it so that it can be optimized, from planning through coding, delivering and maintenance.

A Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is a file or data warehouse that stores configuration information about IT infrastructure and assets

‘Platform as a Product’ is an engineering concept that recommends approaching and managing internal platforms the same way as customer-facing products.

The Internal Developer Portal acts as a single, centralized, easy-to-use and straightforward source of truth for software development operations.

Developer Experience or DevEx is an emerging DevOps practice that focuses on creating the best environment for developers in order to boost productivity, quality, and overall job satisfaction.

Learn from Platform Engineering leaders how to think about developer experience, and how to go about making it better.

Learn from Platform Engineering leaders how to think about developer experience, and how to go about making it better.