A fun list of words used in the DevOps community, including Goat, Unicorn, HugOps, Red/Green, and many others!

1. /
Your Goat Anti-Fragiled My
Snowflake!
Clinton Wolfe
DevOps Practice Lead
Demystifying DevOps Jargon

2. id clintoncwolfe
• DevOps Practice Lead at omniti.com
• We do web & services ops & development
• Chef architect, Ansible engineer, “devops consultant”
• author of various bits of tooling & glue
• we're hiring!

3. A Quick Disclaimer
contribute your experiences at
http://devopsdictionary.com
Our perceptions of meaning may differ

4. via: rivervalleyadventure

5. A DevOps
Bestiary!

6. A DevOps
Bestiary!

7. A DevOps
Bestiary!

8. A DevOps
Bestiary!

9. A DevOps
Bestiary!

10. A DevOps
Bestiary!

11. A DevOps
Bestiary!

12. A DevOps
Bestiary!

13. A DevOps
Bestiary!

14. Goat
•flim_flammer via imgur

15. Goat
A highly capable individual who tends to ignore
the silo boundaries of an organization
Coined By: Michael Ducy

16. Pets vs Cattle
•HauntedSpit via imgur
•SpilledPorpoise via imgur

17. Pets
Nodes / servers / instances that are lovingly
hand-maintained, with long lives
Cattle
Nodes / servers / instances that are easily
replaced; created and destroyed via automation

18. Pets vs Cattle
“We’ve automated everything but the database
servers; the DBAs treat them as Pets.”
Coinage:
Originally from Bill Baker of Microsoft,
popularized by Gavin McCance of CERN

19. Unicorn
•via Amazon

20. Unicorn
(1) – a startup that reached $1Bn in value

21. Unicorn
(1) – a startup that reached $1Bn in value
(2) - a company where DevOps “just works”

22. Unicorn
(1) – a startup that reached $1Bn in value
(2) - a company where DevOps “just works”
(3) - an impossible-to-satisfy job description

23. Canaries
•via Don Blake

24. Canaries
During deployment, a small group of nodes that
receive the update first, and are watched closely
before rolling out to all nodes

25. Canaries
During deployment, a small group of nodes that
receive the update first, and are watched closely
academia.dk

26. Canaries
During deployment, a small group of nodes that
receive the update first, and are watched closely

27. Yak Shaving
•via Daniel Bogan

28. Yak Shaving
Starting to solve a problem, only to find another
problem that must be solved, recursing forever.
May or may not have been neccesary.

29. Chaos Monkey
•via picpost

30. Chaos Monkey
Software that randomly kills running instances
as part of resiliency testing

31. Elk
•photo: Linda Tanner

32. ELK
Elasticsearch + Logstash + Kibana - an open-
source log aggregator / visualizer stack

33. •via segway NZ

34. ABBRVs
(abbreviations)

35. ABBRVs
(abbreviations)

36. ABBRVs
(abbreviations)

37. ABBRVs
(abbreviations)

38. ABBRVs
(abbreviations)

39. ABBRVs
(abbreviations)

40. ABBRVs
(abbreviations)

41. CAMS
via junauto

42. CAMS
a statement of the components of DevOps:
• Culture
• Automation
• Measurement
• Sharing

43. DSL
via wikimedia commons

44. DSL
Domain Specific Language
a syntax and command set designed so that
users can write in their conceptual model
directory '/opt/my-app'
template '/opt/my-app/cfg.yaml' do
source 'alternate-cfg.yaml'
end

45. TLA
•via summitaudio

46. TLA
Three Letter Acronym
Any acronym with 3 letters

47. CM
via John Kane and Pilobolus

48. CM
Configuration Management:
the class of tools including Chef, Puppet,
Ansible, SaltStack, cfengine2, etc

49. CI
via John Kane and Pilobolus

50. CI
1. Continuous Integration – running tests
whenever a commit occurs

51. CI
1. Continuous Integration –running tests
whenever a commit occurs
2. Continuous Improvement – a culture
of looking for ways to improve
processes over time

52. CD
via John Kane and Pilobolus

53. CD
1. Continuous Delivery – building
software packages whenever a commit
occurs

54. CD
1. Continuous Delivery – building
software packages whenever a commit
occurs
2. Continuous Deployment – installing
the software to production whenever a
commit occurs

55. •photo: coolest-toys

56. Potpourri!

57. Potpourri!

58. Potpourri!

59. Potpourri!
Idempotency

60. Potpourri!
Idempotency

61. Potpourri!
Idempotency

62. Red / Green / Refactor
via: cbc.ca

63. Red / Green / Refactor
workflow rhythm when developing under TDD
1. Write failing tests (red terminal output)
2. Write the least code possible to make the
code pass (green terminal output)
3. Clean up the code internally, while ensuring
the tests still pass (refactor)

64. Snowflake
•via: evolvemovement

65. Snowflake
a node that has had manual changes applied
outside of automation
Martin Fowler, 2012

66. Bikeshedding
via time-to-craft.co.uk

67. Bikeshedding
to argue at length over a decision that is, in the
end, arbitrary
Coinage:
From the BSD community (mid 90's?): arguing
over what color to paint the bikeshed while the
house is not yet finished
(Computer Jargon File)

68. Anti-Fragile
via dontthrowmypackage

69. Anti-Fragile
the property of a system designed such that
resiliency increases with damage
From Nassim Taleb and Jez Humble

70. Idempotency
0 x 0 = 0
1 x 0 = 0

71. Idempotency
when a tool will only make a change if it needs to.
From Abstract Algebra
(a kind of Mathematics)

72. •photo: Howard Ignatius

73. * Ops

74. * Ops

75. * Ops

76. * Ops

77. * Ops

78. CoffeeOps
•via goodneighbors

79. CoffeeOps
a series of informal meetups at coffeeshops, etc
to talk DevOps

80. CoffeeOps
a series of informal meetups at coffeeshops, etc
to talk DevOps
Started by Jennifer Davis in 2013
coffeeops.org
Start one in your area!

81. HugOps
•via starwarsdaily

82. HugOps
a meme reflecting empathy among engineers,
especially after an incident, disagreement, or
personal tragedy
Example Usage:
@clintoncwolfe sorry to hear about your talk
going so badly #hugops

83. ChatOps
•via wikimedia commons

84. ChatOps
using your text chat tool as an interface to your
tooling, as well as a log of work
Appears to have emerged from GitHub in 2013,
Jesse Newland - ChatOps at GitHub

85. DevOps
•via wikimedia commons

86. DevOps
the DevOps that can be spoken of
is not the true DevOps
Patrick DeBois, 2009 DevOps Days Ghent
contribute at
http://devopsdictionary.com

87. Ask Me Anything
Win a Goat!
http://devopsdictionary.com
a wiki for these words
@clintoncwolfe