Glossary

API — application programming interface

API

Application Programming Interface

A contract through which one program uses another: operations, data and errors. APIs need not use HTTP; a library interface is also an API.

APM

APM

Application Performance Monitoring

Application Performance Monitoring: analysis of transactions, latency, errors and dependencies. Products may collect data through an agent but still need configuration, access control and interpretation.

Application Load Balancer

ALB

Application Load Balancer

An AWS service distributing application traffic such as HTTP among targets. Listeners, health checks and routing rules determine whether requests reach the right application.

ApplicationSet

Generates Applications from parameters and generators. Helps manage multiple environments, but a generator mistake can have a wide impact; control deletion and permissions.

Architecture decision record

ADR

Architecture Decision Record

A short record of a problem, constraints, alternatives, decision and consequences. It explains why a solution was chosen and when to revisit it.

Argo CD

CD

Continuous Delivery

A GitOps controller comparing Git declarations with cluster resources. Self-healing can revert manual changes, so pause procedures must account for reconciliation.

Argo CD Application

Binds a declaration source, target cluster/namespace and synchronization policy. Sync and health are different assessments; neither alone proves a business flow.

Argo CD AppProject

Constrains Argo CD application repositories, destinations and resource kinds. It does not replace Kubernetes RBAC or database permissions.

ARM64

A product name or identifier; no acronym expansion is invented.

A 64-bit ARM processor architecture. An amd64 image is not automatically an arm64 image; verify the platform and native dependencies.

Artifact provenance

Information about the inputs, process and tools that produced an artifact. Its reliability depends on trust in the producer and verification mechanism.

Artificial intelligence

AI

Artificial Intelligence

A broad family of techniques for tasks such as pattern recognition or content generation. LLMs are one approach, not a synonym for all AI.

Artisan

Laravel command interface. Commands may diagnose, generate code or change data; inspect help and choose the right environment.

Async/await

Syntax for organizing code around asynchronous operations. It does not promise parallel execution; design cancellation, timeouts and limits for the runtime.

Asynchronous Server Gateway Interface

ASGI

Asynchronous Server Gateway Interface

A Python application/server interface supporting HTTP and WebSocket events. Using ASGI does not fix blocking I/O inside async def.

At-least-once

A delivery model allowing repeats to reduce message loss under the system’s assumptions. Recipients must handle duplicates safely.

Authentication

Checking who a client or service is. Establishing identity does not yet determine which operations and data that identity may access.

Authorization

Deciding whether an identity may perform a particular operation on a particular resource. Enforce it server-side even when the resource identifier is known.

Availability zone

AZ

Availability Zone

A distinct infrastructure location within a cloud region used in resilience design. Spreading replicas across zones alone does not ensure data consistency or correct failover.

Aware datetime

A datetime carrying information that determines its UTC offset. It need not include a named timezone with full rules. For Python elapsed duration across DST, convert both endpoints to UTC; subtraction with the same timezone can measure wall-clock time.

AWS

AWS

Amazon Web Services

A cloud-services platform for compute, networking and databases, among other uses. Establish account, region, permissions, costs and cleanup before creating resources.

AWS Certificate Manager

ACM

AWS Certificate Manager

An AWS certificate-management service used by supported integrations. Issuance requires domain validation; it does not automatically configure the whole secure traffic path.

AWS CloudFormation

Creates and updates AWS resources from a stack template. Change sets preview updates; drift detection finds some divergences. A resource should have one management owner.

AWS CloudTrail

Records AWS activity and API calls for auditing. Helps identify who changed configuration; it does not replace application business logs or automatically cover every data event.

AWS Fargate

Managed container compute for supported ECS/EKS scenarios. Not managing nodes does not remove responsibility for images, permissions or data.

AWS KMS

KMS

Key Management Service

Manages cryptographic keys and operations using them. Permission to read an encrypted object and permission to decrypt using a key are separate access concerns.

AWS Lambda

Function execution without managing the execution server. Invocations may be retried depending on the event source; control idempotency, time and concurrency. Distinct from a language lambda expression.

AWS Secrets Manager

Stores secrets and supports rotation. Applications need least privilege and a refresh strategy; changing a secret does not immediately update existing connections.

AWS Step Functions

Orchestrates workflow steps as state machines. Retries and error handling do not automatically undo external effects; design idempotency and compensation.

AWS Systems Manager

SSM

AWS Systems Manager

Resource management and operations tools. Parameter Store holds configuration parameters; operational access through Session Manager should not mean permanent keys and unrestricted SSH.

AWS WAF

WAF

Web Application Firewall

Application-traffic filtering rules before supported entry points. They do not replace code validation/authorization or protect every network path.