Understanding technology terminology is crucial for effective communication and collaboration in modern software development and IT operations. This glossary covers essential terms across four key domains: Identity and Access Management (IAM), Software Development, Platform Engineering, and Artificial Intelligence.

Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Term	Description	Reference
IAM	Identity and Access Management - A framework of policies and technologies ensuring that the right users have appropriate access to technology resources	Wikipedia
IDP	Identity Provider - A system that creates, maintains, and manages identity information and provides authentication services	Wikipedia
PAM	Privileged Access Management - Technologies that control and monitor access to privileged accounts and administrative functions	Wikipedia
IGA	Identity Governance and Administration - Processes and tools for managing user identities, roles, and access rights across an organization	Wikipedia
SCIM	System for Cross-domain Identity Management - An open standard protocol for automating user provisioning and deprovisioning	RFC 7644
SAML	Security Assertion Markup Language - An XML-based standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data between parties	Wikipedia
OIDC	OpenID Connect - An authentication layer built on top of OAuth 2.0 that provides identity verification	OpenID Foundation
OAuth	Open Authorization - An authorization framework that enables applications to obtain limited access to user accounts	Wikipedia
RBAC	Role-Based Access Control - An access control method that restricts system access based on user roles	Wikipedia
ABAC	Attribute-Based Access Control - An access control model that uses attributes (user, resource, environment) to make access decisions	Wikipedia
MFA	Multi-Factor Authentication - A security mechanism requiring multiple verification methods to authenticate a user	Wikipedia
SSO	Single Sign-On - An authentication process that allows users to access multiple applications with one set of credentials	Wikipedia
JWT	JSON Web Token - A compact, URL-safe token format used for securely transmitting information between parties	RFC 7519
LDAP	Lightweight Directory Access Protocol - A protocol for accessing and managing directory information services	Wikipedia
Active Directory	Microsoft’s directory service for managing users, computers, and other resources in a Windows domain	Microsoft Docs

Software Development

Term	Description	Reference
CI/CD	Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment - Practices that automate the integration and deployment of code changes	Wikipedia
DevOps	Development and Operations - A set of practices combining software development and IT operations to shorten the development lifecycle	Wikipedia
GitOps	A methodology for managing infrastructure and application configurations using Git as the single source of truth	GitOps Working Group
IaC	Infrastructure as Code - Managing and provisioning computing infrastructure through machine-readable definition files	Wikipedia
Containerization	Packaging applications and their dependencies into lightweight, portable containers	Wikipedia
Docker	A platform for developing, shipping, and running applications in containers	Docker
Kubernetes	An open-source container orchestration platform for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications	Kubernetes
Microservices	An architectural approach where applications are built as a collection of loosely coupled, independently deployable services	Wikipedia
API Gateway	A service that acts as an entry point for API requests, handling routing, authentication, and rate limiting	Wikipedia
Service Mesh	A dedicated infrastructure layer for managing service-to-service communication in a microservices architecture	Wikipedia
REST	Representational State Transfer - An architectural style for designing networked applications using HTTP methods	Wikipedia
GraphQL	A query language and runtime for APIs that allows clients to request exactly the data they need	GraphQL
gRPC	A high-performance, open-source RPC framework for building distributed systems	gRPC
Serverless	A cloud computing execution model where the cloud provider manages server infrastructure and automatically allocates resources	Wikipedia
Edge Computing	Computing that takes place at or near the physical location of the user or data source	Wikipedia
Terraform	An open-source infrastructure as code tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure	Terraform
Ansible	An open-source automation tool for configuration management, application deployment, and task automation	Ansible
Git	A distributed version control system for tracking changes in source code	Git
GitHub Actions	A CI/CD platform that automates software workflows directly in GitHub repositories	GitHub Actions

Platform Engineering

Term	Description	Reference
Platform Engineering	The practice of building and maintaining internal developer platforms that enable teams to deliver software faster and more reliably	Platform Engineering
Internal Developer Platform (IDP)	A self-service layer that abstracts infrastructure complexity and provides developers with tools and workflows	Internal Developer Platform
Golden Path	A curated, well-documented, and supported path for developers to build and deploy applications with minimal friction	Thoughtworks
Developer Experience (DX)	The overall experience developers have when working with tools, processes, and platforms in their development workflow	Wikipedia
Self-Service	A capability that allows developers to provision and manage resources without manual intervention from operations teams	Atlassian
Platform as a Product	Treating the internal platform as a product with dedicated product management, user feedback, and continuous improvement	Platform as a Product
Developer Portal	A centralized interface where developers can discover, access, and manage tools, services, and documentation	Backstage
Service Catalog	A centralized registry of all services, APIs, and infrastructure components available to development teams	Wikipedia
Observability	The ability to understand a system’s internal state by examining its outputs, including metrics, logs, and traces	Wikipedia
SRE	Site Reliability Engineering - A discipline that applies software engineering principles to operations and infrastructure	Google SRE
SLI	Service Level Indicator - A quantitative measure of some aspect of the level of service provided	Google SRE Book
SLO	Service Level Objective - A target value or range of values for a service level indicator	Google SRE Book
SLA	Service Level Agreement - A commitment between a service provider and a client regarding service performance	Wikipedia
Chaos Engineering	The practice of intentionally introducing failures into systems to test resilience and identify weaknesses	Wikipedia
GitOps	Using Git as the single source of truth for declarative infrastructure and applications	GitOps Working Group
Backstage	An open-source platform for building developer portals, created by Spotify	Backstage
Internal Developer Platform	A self-service layer that provides developers with the tools and capabilities they need to build, deploy, and operate applications	Internal Developer Platform

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Term	Description	Reference
AI	Artificial Intelligence - Computer systems that can perform tasks typically requiring human intelligence	Wikipedia
ML	Machine Learning - A subset of AI that enables systems to learn from data without explicit programming	Wikipedia
Deep Learning	Machine learning using neural networks with multiple hidden layers to learn hierarchical representations	Wikipedia
Neural Network	Computing systems inspired by biological neural networks, consisting of interconnected nodes organized in layers	Wikipedia
CNN	Convolutional Neural Network - A type of neural network specialized for processing grid-like data such as images	Wikipedia
RNN	Recurrent Neural Network - A type of neural network designed to process sequential data with memory of previous inputs	Wikipedia
LSTM	Long Short-Term Memory - A type of RNN that can learn long-term dependencies in sequential data	Wikipedia
Transformer	A neural network architecture introduced in 2017 that uses attention mechanisms instead of recurrence, forming the foundation for modern language models	Attention Is All You Need
LLM	Large Language Model - A type of AI model trained on vast amounts of text data to understand and generate human-like text	Wikipedia
GenAI	Generative AI - AI systems that can generate new content (text, images, audio, video) rather than just analyzing existing data	Wikipedia
Agentic AI	AI systems that can act autonomously to achieve goals, making decisions and taking actions without constant human oversight	Wikipedia
RAG	Retrieval-Augmented Generation - A technique that enhances language models by combining retrieval of relevant information from knowledge bases with generative capabilities	RAG Paper
Inference	The process of using a trained model to make predictions or generate outputs on new data	Wikipedia
Embedding	A vector representation of data (text, images, etc.) that captures semantic meaning in a numerical format	Wikipedia
Fine-Tuning	The process of adapting a pre-trained model to a specific task or domain by training it further on task-specific data	Wikipedia
Prompt Engineering	The practice of designing effective prompts to guide AI models to produce desired outputs	Prompt Engineering Guide
Hallucination	When AI models generate plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical information	Wikipedia
Token	A unit of text that a language model processes (can be a word, subword, or character depending on the tokenization method)	Wikipedia
Supervised Learning	Machine learning approach where models learn from labeled examples (input-output pairs)	Wikipedia
Unsupervised Learning	Machine learning approach that finds patterns in unlabeled data without predefined outputs	Wikipedia
Reinforcement Learning	Machine learning approach where agents learn through trial and error with rewards and penalties	Wikipedia
Backpropagation	Algorithm for training neural networks that calculates gradients and updates weights to minimize error	Wikipedia
Gradient Descent	Optimization algorithm used to minimize loss functions by iteratively moving in the direction of steepest descent	Wikipedia
Overfitting	When a model learns training data too well, including noise, and performs poorly on new data	Wikipedia
Transfer Learning	Technique where a model trained on one task is adapted for a different but related task	Wikipedia

Additional Resources

For deeper understanding of these concepts, consider exploring:

• IAM: NIST Digital Identity Guidelines
• Development: The Twelve-Factor App
• Platform Engineering: Platform Engineering Community
• AI/ML: The History of Artificial Intelligence, Understanding AI and Machine Learning

This glossary serves as a starting point for understanding the terminology used in modern software development, identity management, platform engineering, and artificial intelligence. As the technology landscape evolves, new terms and concepts continue to emerge, making continuous learning essential for professionals in these fields.