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.