Datadog’s infrastructure comprises hundreds of distributed services, which are constantly discovering other services to network with, exchanging data, streaming events, triggering actions, coordinating distributed transactions involving multiple services, and more. Implementing a networking solution for such a large, complex application comes with its own set of challenges, including scalability, load balancing, fault tolerance, compatibility, and latency.

Imagine a well-designed plumbing system with pipes carrying water from a well, a reservoir, and an underground storage tank to various rooms in your house. It will have valves, pumps, and filters to ensure the water is of good quality and is supplied with adequate pressure. It will also have pressure gauges installed at some key points to monitor whether the system is functioning efficiently. From time to time, you will check pressure, water purity, and if there are any issues across the system.

Look, we've all been there: there's a term, you've heard it one hundred times. You've nodded as others said it in meetings. And now, you've started to say it. The only tiny insignificant problem is that you're not 100% sure what it actually means or how it's different from another similar term. I feel you. So I wrote this DevOps glossary with my highly opinionated definitions of common DevOps industry terms.