DevOps engineer English
English for DevOps Engineers: CI/CD, Infrastructure and On-Call in English
September 15, 2026
A bilingual reference for CI/CD vocabulary, infrastructure as code terms, monitoring concepts, and postmortem language. Built for DevOps engineers who need English for their daily work.
1. CI/CD Vocabulary
These terms appear in pipeline configurations, deployment runbooks, and team discussions. Understanding them in English lets you read official documentation and participate in cross-team conversations.
| Term | Spanish | Example |
|---|---|---|
| pipeline | pipeline / tubería de CI/CD | The pipeline runs lint, tests, and build on every pull request. |
| artifact | artefacto | The build artifact is a Docker image pushed to the registry. |
| runner | runner / ejecutor | We use self-hosted runners for jobs that need access to internal resources. |
| rollback | rollback / reversión | The team triggered a rollback after detecting elevated error rates. |
| canary deployment | despliegue canario | We route 5% of traffic to the canary deployment before rolling it out fully. |
| blue-green deployment | despliegue azul-verde | Blue-green deployment lets you switch traffic instantly between two identical environments. |
| feature flag | feature flag / bandera de características | Enable the new checkout flow for 10% of users using a feature flag. |
| smoke test | smoke test / prueba de humo | The smoke test checks that the service starts and returns a 200 on the health endpoint. |
| deployment window | ventana de despliegue | We only deploy during the deployment window: Tuesday to Thursday, 10am-4pm UTC. |
| hotfix | hotfix / corrección urgente | We pushed a hotfix to production without going through the full pipeline. |
| freeze | freeze / congelación de despliegues | There is a deployment freeze from December 20 to January 3. |
2. Infrastructure as Code Vocabulary
Terraform, Pulumi, Ansible, and similar tools have documentation almost exclusively in English. These terms are the foundation of any IaC conversation.
| Term | Spanish | Example |
|---|---|---|
| provisioning | aprovisionamiento | Terraform handles the provisioning of all cloud resources. |
| drift | drift / desviación de configuración | The drift check found three resources that were modified outside of Terraform. |
| immutable infrastructure | infraestructura inmutable | With immutable infrastructure, you replace servers instead of updating them in place. |
| state file | archivo de estado | The Terraform state file tracks which resources exist in the cloud. |
| plan vs apply | plan vs apply | Always run plan before apply to see what changes Terraform will make. |
| remote state | estado remoto | Store the state file in S3 with remote state to share it across the team. |
| bastion host | bastion host / servidor bastión | SSH into the private instances through the bastion host. |
| peering | peering / emparejamiento de redes | Set up VPC peering to allow traffic between the two networks. |
| egress | egress / tráfico saliente | Restrict egress traffic so instances can't reach the internet directly. |
| ingress | ingress / tráfico entrante | The ingress controller routes external traffic to the right service. |
3. Monitoring and Observability Vocabulary
SRE culture, born at Google, introduced a precise English vocabulary for reliability. These terms are now standard across the industry.
| Term | Spanish | Example |
|---|---|---|
| alert | alerta | The alert fired when error rate exceeded 1% for 5 minutes. |
| threshold | umbral | Set the threshold at 95th percentile latency above 500ms. |
| on-call rotation | rotación de guardia / on-call rotation | You are next on the on-call rotation starting Monday. |
| incident | incidente | We declared an incident when the payment service went down. |
| severity level | nivel de severidad | This is a P1 incident: it affects all users and requires immediate response. |
| escalation | escalación | If you can't resolve it in 30 minutes, escalate to the on-call lead. |
| MTTR | MTTR (Tiempo Medio de Recuperación) | Our MTTR for P1 incidents is under 45 minutes. |
| SLI | SLI (Indicador de Nivel de Servicio) | Request success rate is our primary SLI for the API. |
| SLO | SLO (Objetivo de Nivel de Servicio) | Our SLO is 99.9% availability measured over a rolling 30-day window. |
| SLA | SLA (Acuerdo de Nivel de Servicio) | We offer a 99.5% uptime SLA with credits if we breach it. |
| error budget | error budget / presupuesto de errores | We spent 60% of our monthly error budget in the first week. |
| runbook | runbook / libro de procedimientos | The runbook explains how to restart the service when it gets into this state. |
| tracing | trazabilidad / tracing | Distributed tracing shows where the latency spike occurs in the request path. |
| span | span / tramo | Each span represents one operation in a distributed trace. |
| correlation ID | ID de correlación | Attach a correlation ID to every request so you can trace it across services. |
4. Postmortem and Handoff Phrases
These are the phrases you will use in incident retrospectives and cross-timezone handoffs. They follow a specific structure in English that is worth learning precisely.
“The root cause was a misconfigured environment variable.”
State the primary cause of an incident in a postmortem.
“Contributing factors included insufficient test coverage and a missing health check.”
List secondary factors that made the incident worse or harder to detect.
“We detected the issue via an automated alert on error rate.”
Explain how the incident was discovered.
“The incident was resolved by reverting the deployment.”
State how the team fixed the issue.
“Action items to prevent recurrence:”
Introduce the list of follow-up tasks in a postmortem document.
“Handing off to the EMEA team at 9am UTC.”
Use during a handoff between on-call rotations across time zones.
“We will conduct a blameless postmortem on Friday.”
Announce a postmortem meeting focused on systemic causes, not individual blame.
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Written by
Roxana LafuenteLingua-e's founder
Roxana Lafuente is a software engineer with 8+ years of experience. At the beginning of her career, even though she had already passed the First Certificate in English, she still froze every time she had to speak up in the daily standup. That was a gap nobody was fixing. After 2,000+ standups, she figured out what actually builds fluency: practice that looks like your real work. She built Lingua-e so other developers wouldn't have to take the long road to feel confident working in an international development environment.