A Brief, Incomplete and Mostly Wrong DevOps Glossary
📰 Hacker News · adamgordonbell
Learn a humorous and relatable DevOps glossary to understand the realities of DevOps practices and terminology
Action Steps
- Read the DevOps glossary to understand the humorous takes on common terms like DevOps, DevOps Engineer, and Site Reliability Engineer
- Identify the differences between idealistic and realistic DevOps practices
- Apply the glossary to your own work to better navigate the complexities of DevOps
- Use the glossary to facilitate discussions and team-building activities around DevOps practices
- Explore the related articles and resources provided to deepen your understanding of DevOps concepts
Who Needs to Know This
DevOps engineers, developers, and operations teams can benefit from this glossary to better understand the nuances of DevOps terminology and practices
Key Insight
💡 The DevOps glossary highlights the differences between idealistic and realistic DevOps practices, providing a relatable and humorous take on common terminology
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🤣 Discover a humorous DevOps glossary that pokes fun at idealistic terminology and reveals the realities of DevOps practices 🚀
Key Takeaways
Learn a humorous and relatable DevOps glossary to understand the realities of DevOps practices and terminology
Full Article
Title: A Brief, Incomplete and Mostly Wrong Devops Glossary
URL Source: https://earthly.dev/blog/devops-glossary/
Published Time: 2023-09-24T00:00:00-04:00
Markdown Content:
[](https://earthly.dev/blog/devops-glossary/)
**Earthly Lunar:** Your Guardrails, Everywhere. Turn postmortems into automated PR-level guardrails. [Learn More](https://earthly.dev/).
**Earthly Lunar:** Your Guardrails, Everywhere. [Learn More](https://earthly.dev/).
[](https://earthly.dev/)
[](https://earthly.dev/)
[How it works](https://earthly.dev/how-lunar-works/)[Guardrails](https://earthly.dev/lunar/guardrails/)[Integrations](https://earthly.dev/lunar/integrations/)[Docs](https://docs-lunar.earthly.dev/)[Blog](https://earthly.dev/blog/)[Automate Now](https://earthly.dev/automate-your-process/)[Book a Demo](https://earthly.dev/book-demo/)
[How it works](https://earthly.dev/how-lunar-works/)[Guardrails](https://earthly.dev/lunar/guardrails/)[Integrations](https://earthly.dev/lunar/integrations/)[Docs](https://docs-lunar.earthly.dev/)[Blog](https://earthly.dev/blog/)[Automate Now](https://earthly.dev/automate-your-process/)
[Book a Demo](https://earthly.dev/book-demo/)

[Blog](https://earthly.dev/blog/)/[Articles](https://earthly.dev/blog/categories/articles/)
#### Related
* [‣ Kubernetes Developer Tools](https://earthly.dev/blog/devetools-for-k8s/ "Developer Tools for Kubernetes")
* [‣ Idiots & Maniacs](https://earthly.dev/blog/idiots-and-maniacs/ "Idiots And Maniacs")
* [‣ Earthly Cloud Introduction](https://earthly.dev/blog/earthly-cloud-free-tier-launch/ "Introducing Earthly Cloud")
#### Popular Posts
* [‣ Canary Deployments in Kuber...](https://earthly.dev/blog/canary-deployment-in-k8s/ "Using Canary Deployments in Kubernetes")
* [‣ Docker Secrets Guide](https://earthly.dev/blog/docker-secrets/ "The Complete Guide to Docker Secrets")
* [‣ Manage Kubernetes Resources](https://earthly.dev/blog/managing-k8s-with-k9s/ "How to Manage Kubernetes Resources Using K9s")
# A Brief, Incomplete and Mostly Wrong Devops Glossary
8 minute read Updated: October 6, 2023

Adam Gordon Bell
You’ve seen them — the pristine glossaries, endorsed by industry titans like the CNCF, with terms that sound like they’re straight out of a sci-fi movie. All impressive and idealistic. But we all know that on the ground, where build meets deploy, things aren’t always as polished as the glossary makes it seem.
So here’s my DevOps glossary in no particular order.
**DevOps:** A magical realm where developers and operations live in harmony, everything that moves has been automated, and Terraform is still licensed MPL 2.
**DevOps Engineer:** An ops person who abandoned problem solving and bash for ‘orchestrating solutions’ and YAML. Specializes in ‘breaking down silos,’ aka forwarding Slack messages between the Dev and Ops teams.
**Blameless Postmortems:** A safe space where devs and ops blame “process” and “weird scripts,” never people. Steve always gets the most action items, though — read into that what you will.
**Incident:** It’s not an ‘outage,’ it’s an unscheduled exercise in Incident Response, an impromptu team-building activity leading to a profoundly underwhelming Root Cause Analysis report. It’s basically a ‘Whodunit?’ but everyone knows it was Steve.
**Site Reliability Engineer:** A rebranded systems engineer with pager induced insomnia. They talk about post-mortems more than medical coroner and make twice as much.
**Platform Engineer:** A sysadmin reborn by mastering Go and trading in 3 a.m. pager duty for noon YAML sessions. Can now say ‘cloud-native’ and ‘serverless’ with a straight face - which is worth a 2x salary bump, now
URL Source: https://earthly.dev/blog/devops-glossary/
Published Time: 2023-09-24T00:00:00-04:00
Markdown Content:
[](https://earthly.dev/blog/devops-glossary/)
**Earthly Lunar:** Your Guardrails, Everywhere. Turn postmortems into automated PR-level guardrails. [Learn More](https://earthly.dev/).
**Earthly Lunar:** Your Guardrails, Everywhere. [Learn More](https://earthly.dev/).
[](https://earthly.dev/)
[](https://earthly.dev/)
[How it works](https://earthly.dev/how-lunar-works/)[Guardrails](https://earthly.dev/lunar/guardrails/)[Integrations](https://earthly.dev/lunar/integrations/)[Docs](https://docs-lunar.earthly.dev/)[Blog](https://earthly.dev/blog/)[Automate Now](https://earthly.dev/automate-your-process/)[Book a Demo](https://earthly.dev/book-demo/)
[How it works](https://earthly.dev/how-lunar-works/)[Guardrails](https://earthly.dev/lunar/guardrails/)[Integrations](https://earthly.dev/lunar/integrations/)[Docs](https://docs-lunar.earthly.dev/)[Blog](https://earthly.dev/blog/)[Automate Now](https://earthly.dev/automate-your-process/)
[Book a Demo](https://earthly.dev/book-demo/)

[Blog](https://earthly.dev/blog/)/[Articles](https://earthly.dev/blog/categories/articles/)
#### Related
* [‣ Kubernetes Developer Tools](https://earthly.dev/blog/devetools-for-k8s/ "Developer Tools for Kubernetes")
* [‣ Idiots & Maniacs](https://earthly.dev/blog/idiots-and-maniacs/ "Idiots And Maniacs")
* [‣ Earthly Cloud Introduction](https://earthly.dev/blog/earthly-cloud-free-tier-launch/ "Introducing Earthly Cloud")
#### Popular Posts
* [‣ Canary Deployments in Kuber...](https://earthly.dev/blog/canary-deployment-in-k8s/ "Using Canary Deployments in Kubernetes")
* [‣ Docker Secrets Guide](https://earthly.dev/blog/docker-secrets/ "The Complete Guide to Docker Secrets")
* [‣ Manage Kubernetes Resources](https://earthly.dev/blog/managing-k8s-with-k9s/ "How to Manage Kubernetes Resources Using K9s")
# A Brief, Incomplete and Mostly Wrong Devops Glossary
8 minute read Updated: October 6, 2023

Adam Gordon Bell
You’ve seen them — the pristine glossaries, endorsed by industry titans like the CNCF, with terms that sound like they’re straight out of a sci-fi movie. All impressive and idealistic. But we all know that on the ground, where build meets deploy, things aren’t always as polished as the glossary makes it seem.
So here’s my DevOps glossary in no particular order.
**DevOps:** A magical realm where developers and operations live in harmony, everything that moves has been automated, and Terraform is still licensed MPL 2.
**DevOps Engineer:** An ops person who abandoned problem solving and bash for ‘orchestrating solutions’ and YAML. Specializes in ‘breaking down silos,’ aka forwarding Slack messages between the Dev and Ops teams.
**Blameless Postmortems:** A safe space where devs and ops blame “process” and “weird scripts,” never people. Steve always gets the most action items, though — read into that what you will.
**Incident:** It’s not an ‘outage,’ it’s an unscheduled exercise in Incident Response, an impromptu team-building activity leading to a profoundly underwhelming Root Cause Analysis report. It’s basically a ‘Whodunit?’ but everyone knows it was Steve.
**Site Reliability Engineer:** A rebranded systems engineer with pager induced insomnia. They talk about post-mortems more than medical coroner and make twice as much.
**Platform Engineer:** A sysadmin reborn by mastering Go and trading in 3 a.m. pager duty for noon YAML sessions. Can now say ‘cloud-native’ and ‘serverless’ with a straight face - which is worth a 2x salary bump, now
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