Word list

This document summarizes information about the proper use of terminology for the Keptn project.

The Keptn project does not maintain a formal style guide but should adhere to recommendations in:

• CNCF Style Guide.

• The Kubernetes documentation is a good reference for Kubernetes terms. In particular:

  • Concepts
  • Reference

• The Google developer documentation style guide is a comprehensive reference for technical writers. In particular:

  • Word list includes good information about words and phrases that are commonly used in technical documentation

Keptn terminology

Keptn project

This is the proper name of the project that was developed under the code name of “Keptn Lifecycle Toolkit (KLT)”. The earlier project is called “Keptn v1”.

• Keptn is capitalized when used in prose as the name of the project, although the logo uses a lowercase “k”. Use keptn if it is part of a command name, pathname, an argument to a command or function, etc.

• As a project name that is trademarked, you should not use an apostrophe-s to make it a possessive (“Keptn’s”) or hyphenate it (as in “Keptn-specific”).

The Keptn project is a “toolkit” with three use cases, named:

• Metrics (or Deployment data access)

• Observability (or Deployment observability)

• Release lifecycle management (or Orchestrate deployment checks)

Kubernetes terminology

The Keptn documentation frequently uses Kubernetes terminology. Here are some guidelines for using these terms in Keptn documentation.

• Do not duplicate information from the Kubernetes documentation into the Keptn documentation. We should not be maintaining documentation for software in other projects and products.

• Kubernetes concepts and objects (such as workload or resource) should be lowercase unless they are the proper name of an object.

• The first instance of one of these terms in a section should be a link to the relevant Kubernetes documentation.

• Avoid using generic references to Kubernetes documentation. Instead, link to the particular section that contains the relevant information.

• The dictionary of Kubernetes terms that is used by the Spell checker is in the cspell k8s.txt file. Note that all words are listed in all lowercase so the list can not be used to check capitalization.

CRD, resource, etc

Keptn makes extensive use of Kubernetes Custom resources. It is important to use the related terminology correctly:

• A “Resource Definition (RD)” is the definition (or syntax) of a resource that is part of the official Kubernetes API

• A “Custom Resource Definition (CRD)” is the definition (or syntax) of a resource that Keptn (or some other product) adds to Kubernetes

• An instance of a CRD or RD that a user creates is a custom resource or just a resource but not a CRD or RD. Most of the time, we recommend just using the term “resource”.

• The first occurence of a CRD name in a section should be a link to the CRD YAML Reference under the right component page if there is one. Otherwise, it should be a link to the appropriate spot in the API Reference section.

• Occurrences of a resource name that are not links to a reference page should be enclosed in tics so they render as code-case.