Bare metal
A physical server rented whole, rather than a slice of one sold as a virtual machine. Fixed monthly price, all the hardware is yours.
Bare-Metal KubernetesGlossary
Words we use on calls.
Short definitions of the infrastructure terms on this site, written for founders and CTOs rather than vendors. Each links to where it matters.
Cloud exit
Moving workloads off a hyperscaler (AWS, Azure, GCP) onto owned or rented dedicated infrastructure, usually to cut cost and lock-in.
Credit cliff
The month startup cloud credits expire and the same workload is billed at list price, often 3–10× what the team was budgeting.
Egress
Data leaving a cloud provider's network, billed per gigabyte. Frequently the line item that makes a migration pay for itself.
Bare-Metal KubernetesLock-in
How hard it is to leave a provider. Grows with every proprietary managed service (RDS, ALB, CloudWatch) an application depends on.
Bare-Metal KubernetesRKE2 / k3s
Two Rancher-maintained Kubernetes distributions. k3s is small and quick; RKE2 has hardened defaults for larger or regulated clusters.
Cilium / eBPF
Cilium is Kubernetes networking built on eBPF, which runs small programs inside the Linux kernel. Faster than kube-proxy at high connection counts, with network policy included.
CloudNativePG
A Kubernetes operator that runs PostgreSQL with replicas, automated failover and scheduled backups — the open-source replacement for RDS.
GitOps / ArgoCD
Every cluster change is a commit; ArgoCD keeps the cluster equal to the repo. Rollbacks are reverts and nothing is edited in a console.
Managed retainer
A monthly fee for someone else to hold the pager: monitoring, patching, backups, upgrades and incident response for infrastructure you own.
Pricing, actuallyJamstack
Sites pre-rendered to static files and served from a CDN edge, with a CMS behind the build. Fast by construction; nothing to hack at runtime.
Jamstack Websites + CMSCore Web Vitals
Google's three user-experience metrics — LCP (load), INP (responsiveness), CLS (visual stability) — measured from real visitors and used in ranking.
Jamstack Websites + CMS