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Glossary

This glossary defines the core technical terms used in the Neuland handbook. The goal is to establish a shared domain language (Ubiquitous Language) between business, engineering, and operations.

A

  • API (Application Programming Interface): An interface that enables different software systems to communicate with one another in a standardised way.

B

  • Bounded Context: A central concept from DDD that defines an area in which specific terms have a single, clearly delimited meaning.

C

  • Compliance as Code: The technical implementation of regulatory requirements through automated test scripts in the infrastructure.
  • Conway's Law: The observation that the architecture of a system reflects the communication structures of the organisation that developed it.

D

  • Data Mesh: A decentralised architecture approach in which data ownership and responsibility reside with the respective business domains.

E

  • EMBAG: The Swiss Federal Act on the Use of Electronic Means to Fulfil Government Tasks (Open Source by Default for federal authorities).

G

  • Golden Path: A standardised, platform-team-supported route for developers to complete a task (e.g. creating a new service) quickly and safely.

L

  • Legacy System: An outdated but often business-critical IT system that is difficult to maintain or integrate.

M

  • MACH Architecture: Acronym for Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless.
  • Managed Service: An IT service (e.g. a database) whose operation and maintenance are handled by an external provider.
  • Microservices: An architectural style in which an application is built as a collection of small, independent, and specialised services.

P

  • PADN: Pragmatische Anleitung Digitales Neuland (this handbook).
  • Platform Engineering: The discipline of building internal platforms to reduce cognitive load for engineering teams.

R

  • Refactoring: The improvement of a codebase's internal structure without changing its external behaviour.

S

  • SaaS (Software as a Service): A model in which software is rented over the internet as a service rather than installed locally.
  • SBOM (Software Bill of Materials): A machine-readable inventory of all components and dependencies of a software system.
  • SLO (Service Level Objective): A concrete target for the reliability of a service (e.g. 99.9% uptime).
  • SRE (Site Reliability Engineering): A discipline from Google that applies software engineering methods to IT operations to build highly scalable and reliable systems.
  • Strangler Fig Pattern: A method for incrementally replacing legacy systems by growing new services around them.

T

  • TCO (Total Cost of Ownership): The total cost of an IT system over its entire lifecycle (acquisition, operation, maintenance, decommissioning).

Z

  • Zero Trust: A security model that assumes no user or device on the network can be blindly trusted (never trust, always verify).