Acronym glossary
The acronyms used across these docs, expanded once here.
| Acronym | Meaning | In short |
|---|---|---|
| ACL | Access Control List | Rules defining who is allowed to access what |
| AAI | Authentication and Authorization Infrastructure | Identity federation of the Swiss universities, operated by SWITCH |
| BMC / IPMI | Baseboard Management Controller / Intelligent Platform Management Interface | Remote out-of-band management of server hardware (console, power, virtual media), independent of the OS |
| CE | Community Edition | The free, open-source edition of GitLab |
| CI/CD | Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery | Automatic execution of tests and deployments on every code change |
| CUDA | Compute Unified Device Architecture | NVIDIA's GPU computing platform |
| DNS | Domain Name System | Translation of domain names into IP addresses |
| FQDN | Fully Qualified Domain Name | Complete domain name (e.g. git.isc.hevs.ch) |
| HA | High Availability | Automatic restart of critical VMs on another node in case of failure |
| IdP | Identity Provider | Identity provider — here SWITCH edu-ID |
| IDS | Intrusion Detection System | Intrusion detection (Suricata on the network, Wazuh on the hosts) |
| K8s | Kubernetes | Container orchestrator |
| LXC | Linux Containers | Lightweight system containers (sharing the host kernel), an alternative to VMs in Proxmox |
| NOC | Network Operations Center | Supervision of infrastructure health (metrics, availability, alerts) |
| OIDC | OpenID Connect | Modern authentication protocol built on OAuth 2.0 — chosen for the edu-ID integration |
| PBS | Proxmox Backup Server | Backup server dedicated to Proxmox VMs/containers (deduplicated, incremental, verified) |
| PDM | Proxmox Datacenter Manager | Centralized console to manage several Proxmox hosts/clusters |
| PVE | Proxmox Virtual Environment | The hypervisor: the virtualization layer installed on every machine |
| SAML | Security Assertion Markup Language | Legacy federated authentication protocol (XML), an alternative to OIDC that was not chosen |
| SIEM | Security Information and Event Management | Centralized collection and correlation of security events (Wazuh) |
| SOC | Security Operations Center | Security supervision (intrusions, logs, compliance) |
| SSO | Single Sign-On | Single authentication: one account (edu-ID) for all services |
| TLS | Transport Layer Security | Connection encryption (the "S" in HTTPS) |
| VLAN | Virtual LAN | Logical segmentation of the physical network into isolated zones |
| VM | Virtual Machine | Virtual machine |
| VPN | Virtual Private Network | Encrypted tunnel giving access to the internal network from outside |
| ZFS | (Zettabyte File System) | File system with built-in snapshots, compression and redundancy, used for Proxmox storage |