Cloud Native Glossary Contributor Ladder How To Contribute Style Guide Englishবাংলা (Bengali) Français (French) Deutsch (German) हिन्दी (Hindi) Italiano (Italian) 日本語 (Japanese) 한국어 (Korean) Português (Portuguese) Русский (Russian) 简体中文 (Simplified Chinese) Español (Spanish) 繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese) Türkçe (Turkish) اردو (Urdu) Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese) ...or browse by tag Abstraction Agile Software Development API Gateway Application Programming Interface (API) Autoscaling Bare Metal Machine Blue Green Deployment Canary Deployment Chaos Engineering Client-Server Architecture Cloud Computing Cloud Native Apps Cloud Native Security Cloud Native Storage Cloud Native Technology Cluster Container Orchestration Containerization Containers Continuous Delivery (CD) Continuous Deployment (CD) Continuous integration (CI) Datacenter DevOps DevSecOps Digital Certificate Distributed Apps Distributed System eBPF Edge Computing Event Streaming Event-Driven Architecture Function as a Service (FaaS) GitOps gRPC Horizontal Scaling Host Idempotence Immutable Infrastructure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Ingress Kubernetes Kubernetes Operator Loosely Coupled Architecture Microservices Architecture Monolithic Apps Multitenancy Mutual Transport Layer Security (mTLS) Nodes Observability Platform Engineering Pod Policy as Code (PaC) Portability Reliability Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) Runtime Scalability Security Chaos Engineering Self Healing Serverless Service Service Discovery Service Mesh Service Proxy Shift Left Sidecar Container Site Reliability Engineering Stateful Apps Stateless Apps Tightly Coupled Architecture Transport Layer Security (TLS) Vertical Scaling Virtual Machine Virtualization WebAssembly Zero Trust Architecture Edit this page Report issue Cloud Native Glossary The Cloud Native Glossary aims to make the cloud native space — which is notorious for its complexity — simpler for people by making it easier to understand, not only for technologists but also for people on the business side. To achieve that, we focus on simplicity (e.g., simple language free from buzzwords, examples anyone using technology can relate to, leaving unnecessary details out). The Glossary is a project led by the CNCF Business Value Subcommittee (BVS). Contributing Everybody is invited to suggest changes, additions, and improvements to the Cloud Native Glossary. We employ a community-driven process governed by the CNCF to develop and improve upon this shared lexicon. This Glossary provides a vendor-neutral platform to organize a shared vocabulary around cloud native technologies. Contributions are welcome from all participants who abide by the project’s purpose and charter. Anyone wishing to contribute may submit a GitHub issue or create a pull request. Please ensure you follow the Style Guide, read the How To Contribute doc, join the CNCF Slack workspace, and join the #glossary channel. There is also a #glossary-localizations channel for those who want to help translate the glossary into their native language. Acknowledgements The Cloud Native Glossary was initiated by the CNCF Marketing Committee (Business Value Subcommittee) and includes contributions from Catherine Paganini, Chris Aniszczyk, Daniel Jones, Jason Morgan, Katelin Ramer, Mike Foster, and many more contributors. For a complete contributor list, please refer to this GitHub page. The Glossary is maintained by Seokho Son, Jihoon Seo, Nate W. and Junya Okabe. Catherine Paganini, Jason Morgan, Jorge Castro, and Noah Ispas are Emeritus Maintainers, and we are deeply grateful for their invaluable contributions over the years. License All code contributions are under the Apache 2.0 license. Documentation is distributed under CC BY 4.0. Englishবাংলা (Bengali) Français (French) Deutsch (German) हिन्दी (Hindi) Italiano (Italian) 日本語 (Japanese) 한국어 (Korean) Português (Portuguese) Русский (Russian) 简体中文 (Simplified Chinese) Español (Spanish) 繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese) Türkçe (Turkish) اردو (Urdu) Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese) All CNCF Sites © 2026 Cloud Native Glossary Authors | Documentation Distributed under CC BY 4.0