Top 100 DevOps Abbreviations Cheat Sheet

Ever felt lost in a sea of DevOps acronyms? Whether you're joining a new team, reading technical documentation, or sitting in a meeting where everyone seems to be speaking in abbreviations, this comprehensive guide has you covered. Let's decode the top 100 DevOps abbreviations across cloud, CI/CD, infrastructure, observability, containers, security, and automation.

🧰 Core DevOps Concepts

CI: Continuous Integration
CD: Continuous Delivery / Continuous Deployment
SDLC: Software Development Life Cycle
IaC: Infrastructure as Code
CaC: Compliance as Code
PaC: Policy as Code
GitOps: Git-based Operations (using Git as the source of truth for infra/config)
DevSecOps: Development, Security, and Operations
AIOps: Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations
NoOps: No Operations (fully automated ops)
SRE: Site Reliability Engineering
MLOps: Machine Learning Operations
DataOps: Data Operations
FinOps: Financial Operations (cloud cost optimization)
ChatOps: Chat-based Operations
XOps: Cross-Operations (umbrella term for DevOps, MLOps, etc.)

☁️ Cloud & Infrastructure

AWS: Amazon Web Services
GCP: Google Cloud Platform
AZURE: Microsoft Azure
VPC: Virtual Private Cloud
EC2: Elastic Compute Cloud
S3: Simple Storage Service
EKS: Elastic Kubernetes Service
AKS: Azure Kubernetes Service
GKE: Google Kubernetes Engine
IAM: Identity and Access Management
AMI: Amazon Machine Image
ASG: Auto Scaling Group
ELB: Elastic Load Balancer
RDS: Relational Database Service
EBS: Elastic Block Store
ECS: Elastic Container Service
FaaS: Function as a Service
SaaS: Software as a Service
PaaS: Platform as a Service
IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service
BaaS: Backend as a Service
DNS: Domain Name System
CDN: Content Delivery Network

🐳 Containers & Orchestration

K8s: Kubernetes
CRI: Container Runtime Interface
CNI: Container Network Interface
CSI: Container Storage Interface
OCI: Open Container Initiative
Pod: Smallest deployable unit in Kubernetes
Helm: Kubernetes Package Manager
YAML: Yet Another Markup Language (used for config files)
CRD: Custom Resource Definition
HPA: Horizontal Pod Autoscaler
RBAC: Role-Based Access Control
ETCD: Key-value store used by Kubernetes
Taints/Tolerations: Kubernetes scheduling controls
PVC: Persistent Volume Claim
PV: Persistent Volume
KEDA: Kubernetes Event-driven Autoscaling

⚙️ CI/CD Tools & Pipelines

JENKINS: Popular CI/CD automation tool
GHA: GitHub Actions
GITLAB CI: GitLab Continuous Integration
BB PIPELINES: Bitbucket Pipelines
TF: Terraform
TFE: Terraform Enterprise
CDK: Cloud Development Kit
DSL: Domain Specific Language (for pipelines)
YAML: Used for pipeline configuration
CI/CD: Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment
BFF: Build Fast Fail (testing principle)

🔍 Monitoring, Logging & Observability

APM: Application Performance Monitoring
SLI: Service Level Indicator
SLO: Service Level Objective
SLA: Service Level Agreement
MTTR: Mean Time To Recovery
MTBF: Mean Time Between Failures
MTTA: Mean Time To Acknowledge
MTTD: Mean Time To Detect
OTEL: OpenTelemetry
ELK: Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana
EFK: Elasticsearch, Fluentd, Kibana
SIEM: Security Information and Event Management
SNMP: Simple Network Management Protocol
PromQL: Prometheus Query Language
Grafana: Visualization dashboard for metrics

🔒 Security & Compliance

CSPM: Cloud Security Posture Management
CWPP: Cloud Workload Protection Platform
CIEM: Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management
IAM: Identity and Access Management
SSO: Single Sign-On
MFA: Multi-Factor Authentication
TLS: Transport Layer Security
SSL: Secure Sockets Layer
PKI: Public Key Infrastructure
KMS: Key Management Service
CVE: Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures
CVSS: Common Vulnerability Scoring System
DLP: Data Loss Prevention
IDS: Intrusion Detection System
IPS: Intrusion Prevention System
WAF: Web Application Firewall
SOC2: Service Organization Control 2 (compliance framework)

🧑‍💻 Automation & Configuration Management

Ansible: Automation tool using YAML playbooks
CFEngine: Configuration management tool
Chef: Infrastructure automation platform
Puppet: Configuration management tool
SaltStack: Event-driven automation tool
Bash: Bourne Again Shell
CLI: Command Line Interface
SDK: Software Development Kit
API: Application Programming Interface
JSON: JavaScript Object Notation

📦 Version Control & Collaboration

VCS: Version Control System
DVCS: Distributed Version Control System
PR: Pull Request
MR: Merge Request
CI/CD: Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment
SCM: Source Code Management
Git: Version control system
SVN: Subversion (legacy version control)

🧩 Miscellaneous / Emerging

KPI: Key Performance Indicator
RTO: Recovery Time Objective
RPO: Recovery Point Objective
DR: Disaster Recovery
VCS: Version Control System
ETL: Extract, Transform, Load
API GW: API Gateway
MQ: Message Queue
SR: Service Registry
CSAT: Customer Satisfaction
NPS: Net Promoter Score

🚀 Putting It All Together

Understanding these abbreviations is just the beginning of your DevOps journey. The real power comes from knowing how these technologies and concepts work together to create robust, scalable, and secure systems.

Next Steps:

Bookmark this guide for quick reference during meetings and documentation review
Practice using these terms in context to solidify your understanding
Dive deeper into the technologies that interest you most

Ready to master DevOps practices hands-on? Explore our comprehensive DevOps Roadmap to learn these concepts through real-world projects, industry certifications, and career guidance tailored to becoming a DevOps engineer.

Pro tip: Don't try to memorize all these at once! Keep this guide handy and refer back to it as you encounter these terms in your daily work. Over time, they'll become second nature.