Tech Acronyms: The Reference for Non-Engineers

Engineering shorthand decoded — the technology acronyms that show up in product reviews, vendor evaluations and architecture discussions.

Technology meetings run on acronyms. API, SaaS, SDK, IaaS, PaaS, SSO, CI/CD — engineering teams use them as shorthand, and the people approving the budget or shaping the roadmap are often expected to keep up without asking.

This is the tech acronyms reference for non-engineers and senior operators: every term that comes up in product, vendor and architecture conversations, defined the way your CTO would explain it over coffee — not the way Wikipedia would.

The list — 63 acronyms

• 2FA — Two-Factor Authentication
• ABAC — Attribute-Based Access Control
• ACID — Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability
• API — Application Programming Interface
• BASE — Basically Available, Soft state, Eventual consistency
• BYOC — Bring Your Own Cloud
• CAP — Consistency, Availability, Partition tolerance
• CDN — Content Delivery Network
• CI/CD — Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment
• CTA — Call to Action
• dbt — Data Build Tool
• DKIM — DomainKeys Identified Mail
• DMARC — Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance
• DNS — Domain Name System
• DRY — Don't Repeat Yourself
• EC2 — Elastic Compute Cloud
• ELT — Extract, Load, Transform
• ETL — Extract, Transform, Load
• FaaS — Function as a Service
• FinOps — Cloud Financial Operations
• GraphQL — Graph Query Language
• HTTPS — Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure
• IaaS — Infrastructure as a Service
• IaC — Infrastructure as Code
• IAM — Identity and Access Management
• IPaaS — Integration Platform as a Service
• JSON — JavaScript Object Notation
• K8s — Kubernetes
• KISS — Keep It Simple, Stupid
• MFA — Multi-Factor Authentication
• OAuth — Open Authorization
• OLAP — Online Analytical Processing
• OLTP — Online Transaction Processing
• PaaS — Platform as a Service
• QA — Quality Assurance
• RBAC — Role Based Access Control
• RDS — Relational Database Service
• REST — Representational State Transfer
• RPO — Recovery Point Objective
• RTO — Recovery Time Objective
• S3 — Simple Storage Service
• SaaS (deep) — Software as a Service (deep dive)
• SDK — Software Development Kit (deep)
• SEM — Search Engine Marketing
• SEO — Search Engine Optimization
• SLO — Service Level Objective
• SOA — Service Oriented Architecture
• SOLID — Single-responsibility, Open-closed, Liskov, Interface-segregation, Dependency-inversion
• SPF — Sender Policy Framework
• SQL — Structured Query Language
• SRE — Site Reliability Engineering
• SSH — Secure Shell
• SSO — Single Sign-On
• TLS — Transport Layer Security
• UI — User Interface
• UTM — Urchin Tracking Module
• UX — User Experience
• VM — Virtual Machine
• VPC — Virtual Private Cloud
• VPN — Virtual Private Network
• WCAG — Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
• YAGNI — You Aren't Gonna Need It
• Zero Trust — Zero Trust Architecture