Infrastructure
APIs, models, hosting and the plumbing behind AI products.
API
An API (Application Programming Interface) is a defined set of endpoints and rules that lets one program request functionality or data from another.
CDN
A CDN is a geographically distributed network of servers that caches and serves website content from a location near the requesting user, reducing latency and load on the origin server.
CI/CD
CI/CD is a set of automated practices and tools that build, test and release software every time code changes, reducing the manual effort and risk involved in shipping updates.
Container
A container is a standardised, isolated unit of software that packages an application together with its dependencies, sharing the host operating system's kernel rather than running a full separate operating system.
Docker
Docker is a software platform that lets developers build, distribute and run applications inside containers, providing a consistent runtime environment across different machines.
Inference
Inference is the stage at which a trained machine learning model processes new input and produces an output, distinct from training, which is the earlier process of building the model's parameters from data.
MCP (Model Context Protocol)
The Model Context Protocol is an open standard for connecting AI models to external tools, data and services through a shared JSON-RPC interface.
Serverless
Serverless computing is a cloud model where a provider manages the servers automatically, running application code on demand and billing based on actual usage rather than pre-allocated capacity.
SLM
An SLM is a language model built with a smaller parameter count and training footprint than large flagship models, optimised for efficiency, low latency and deployment on limited hardware rather than maximum general capability.
Vector Search
Vector search is a retrieval technique that ranks results by similarity between numeric embeddings, enabling meaning-based (semantic) matching rather than lexical matching.