You are a developer, so here is the minimum DevOps vocabulary, mapped to ideas you already know.
| Term | What it means | Developer analogy |
|---|---|---|
| Provision | Create cloud resources (a server, a database, etc.). | Like npm install but for infrastructure - it brings the things into existence. |
| Environment | An isolated copy of the whole system: dev, staging, prod. | Like NODE_ENV - separate places to run code, but here each is a whole separate set of real cloud resources. |
| Dev / Staging / Prod | Development (experiment freely), Staging (a prod-like rehearsal), Production (real users). | Same concept you already use, just applied to infrastructure. |
| CI/CD | Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery: automation that runs whenever you push code, to test and deploy it. | Like GitHub Actions - a robot that reacts to your git push. |
| Pipeline | The ordered series of automated steps CI/CD runs (e.g. build → test → deploy). | A workflow file's job list. |
| HA (High Availability) | Designing so that if one machine or data center dies, the system keeps running. | Redundancy: more than one of everything important. |
| DR (Disaster Recovery) | A plan/capacity to recover if an entire region fails. | A backup site in a different geography. |
| Idempotent | Running the same operation twice produces the same result as running it once. | PUT vs POST - applying the same config again changes nothing if already applied. |
| Drift | When the real infrastructure no longer matches the code (someone clicked in the console). | Your DB schema diverging from your migrations. |
| Least privilege | Give each actor only the permissions it strictly needs, nothing more. | Scoping an API token to read-only when that's all it needs. |
Keep these handy; they recur throughout the repo.