---
title: Glossary
description: Terminology used across Jesse Robbins' writing on DevOps, chaos engineering, AI developer tools, and seed-stage investing.
doc_version: "1.0"
last_updated: 2026-05-18
---

# Glossary

Terminology used across Jesse Robbins' writing on DevOps, chaos engineering, AI developer tools, and seed-stage investing.

## AI developer tools

Software that helps engineers build, ship, and operate AI-powered applications, including agent frameworks, evaluation harnesses, vector databases, and inference platforms.

## Chaos engineering

The practice of deliberately injecting failure into production systems to learn how they fail, originated in Jesse's GameDay exercises at Amazon.

## Configuration management

Automated, declarative control of server and application state. Chef, which Jesse cofounded, was a foundational configuration management tool.

## Developer tools

Software that other software engineers use as part of building, shipping, or operating applications.

## DevOps

A movement that emerged around 2009 to merge software development and operations practices. Jesse cofounded the DevOps movement and the Velocity Conference that catalyzed it.

## GameDay

A structured exercise in which engineers deliberately break parts of a production system to test resilience and team response. Jesse created GameDay at Amazon.

## Immutable infrastructure

A pattern where servers are never modified after deployment; changes are made by replacing the entire instance.

## Incident management

The discipline of responding to, communicating about, and learning from production failures.

## Infrastructure as code

Managing infrastructure through versioned, declarative source code rather than ad-hoc commands.

## Observability

The ability to understand a system's internal state from its external outputs (logs, metrics, traces).

## Platform engineering

The practice of building internal developer platforms that abstract infrastructure complexity from product teams.

## Resilience engineering

A field of study focused on how complex systems adapt to and recover from failure.

## Seed-stage investing

Investing at the earliest stage of a company's life, typically pre-product or just after first customers.

## Site reliability engineering (SRE)

A discipline that applies software engineering practices to operations, originated at Google and shaped by ideas Jesse advanced at Amazon.

## Web operations

The practice of running internet-scale services. Jesse coedited the O'Reilly book of the same name.

## Sitemap

See [sitemap.md](https://jesserobbins.com/sitemap.md) for the full list of pages on this site.