Google Cloud PCDOE glossary of CI/CD, observability, automation, and reliability terms.
Use this glossary when Google Cloud Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer (PCDOE) terms start to blur together. The goal is practical recognition, not encyclopedia coverage.
| Term | Exam meaning |
|---|---|
| SRE | Site Reliability Engineering: operating software with reliability, automation, and measurement practices. |
| Error budget | Allowed unreliability before feature velocity should slow for reliability work. |
| Canary release | Small-scope rollout used to validate a change before full release. |
| Artifact | Versioned build output deployed to an environment. |
| Runbook | Operational instructions for response or recovery. |
| Toil | Manual, repetitive operational work that should be reduced or automated. |
| Pair | How to separate them |
|---|---|
| CI/CD and release vs SRE and reliability | Ask which layer the scenario is testing, then match the answer to that layer only. |
| Control vs evidence | A control changes behavior; evidence proves behavior or supports investigation. |
| Managed service vs custom build | Managed services win for lower operational effort unless the requirement needs unsupported customization. |
| Prevention vs detection | Prevention blocks or reduces a bad event; detection finds or reports that it happened. |
Do not memorize terms in isolation. For each term, write one scenario where it is the best answer, one scenario where it is a distractor, and one signal that proves it worked.