Glossary
Abbreviations used across this site, explained once here rather than assumed. Terms in article text link straight to their entry below.
Space & Launch Terms
USSF
United States Space Force
The branch of the US military responsible for space operations; sponsors many classified national-security launches (e.g. USSF-366).
NSSL
National Security Space Launch
The US program that procures launches for military and intelligence satellites, mostly flown by ULA and SpaceX.
NRO
National Reconnaissance Office
The US agency that designs, builds, and operates spy satellites — the customer behind many classified 'NROL-' missions.
LEO
Low Earth Orbit
Roughly 160–2,000 km up. Home to the ISS, Starlink, and most Earth-observation satellites — the cheapest orbit to reach.
GTO
Geostationary Transfer Orbit
A highly elliptical orbit used as a stepping stone to reach geostationary orbit, ~35,786 km up.
SSO
Sun-Synchronous Orbit
A polar orbit timed so a satellite passes over any given point at the same local solar time every day — common for imaging satellites. SSO also means something unrelated in DevOps contexts — see “Terms With More Than One Meaning” below.
ISS
International Space Station
The crewed space station in low Earth orbit, jointly operated by NASA, Roscosmos, ESA, JAXA, and CSA.
ULA
United Launch Alliance
A Boeing/Lockheed Martin joint venture flying the Atlas V and Vulcan rockets, mostly for US government payloads.
NASA
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
The US civilian space agency.
ESA
European Space Agency
A 22-member-state intergovernmental space agency headquartered in Paris.
ISRO
Indian Space Research Organisation
India's national space agency.
ROSCOSMOS
Roscosmos State Space Corporation
Russia's federal space agency, operator of Soyuz and Proton launches.
SLC
Space Launch Complex
A numbered launch pad designation used at US ranges, e.g. Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg.
DevOps & Cloud Terms
CI/CD
Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment
Automatically building, testing, and shipping code on every change instead of releasing manually.
IaC
Infrastructure as Code
Defining servers, networks, and cloud resources in versioned, reviewable code (Terraform, Ansible, Pulumi) instead of clicking through a console.
SBOM
Software Bill of Materials
A generated list of everything inside a build — dependencies, versions, licenses — used to prove what shipped and check it for vulnerabilities.
SCA
Software Composition Analysis
Automated scanning of open-source dependencies against known-vulnerability databases.
SAST
Static Application Security Testing
Scanning source code itself for vulnerability patterns, without running it.
HPA
Horizontal Pod Autoscaler
The Kubernetes mechanism that adds or removes running pods automatically based on load.
CNI
Container Network Interface
The plugin standard Kubernetes uses to wire up pod networking.
RTO
Recovery Time Objective
The target maximum time a system can be down before recovery, after a failure or disaster.
RPO
Recovery Point Objective
The maximum acceptable amount of data loss, measured in time, after a failure or disaster.
HA
High Availability
Architecture designed so a single component failing doesn't take the whole system down.
DR
Disaster Recovery
The plan and infrastructure for keeping a business running after a major outage — a whole site, region, or provider going down.
SLA
Service Level Agreement
A committed, measurable target for uptime or response time, usually with consequences if it's missed.
CDN
Content Delivery Network
A distributed network of servers that caches content close to users to reduce latency.
TLS
Transport Layer Security
The encryption protocol behind HTTPS (successor to the older SSL).
DNS
Domain Name System
Translates domain names like devops.majbase.com into IP addresses.
VPN
Virtual Private Network
An encrypted tunnel connecting a remote user or site into a private network.
API
Application Programming Interface
A defined way for one piece of software to talk to another.
CMDB
Configuration Management Database
A system of record listing what hardware and software assets exist and how they relate to each other.
Terms With More Than One Meaning
SSO
- Sun-Synchronous Orbit — A polar orbit timed to cross any given latitude at the same local solar time daily — see Space & Launch Terms.
- Single Sign-On — Logging in once to access multiple systems, instead of separate credentials for each.
OCI
- Oracle Cloud Infrastructure — Oracle's public cloud platform — see our cloud infrastructure consulting page.
- Open Container Initiative — The industry standard that defines what a container image and runtime actually are, which Docker and Kubernetes both implement.