Cloud Native Experience Glossary

This glossary provides a unified vocabulary for the Cloud Native Experience (CNE). Use these terms ensure consistent communication across development, platform engineering, and operations teams.

Term	Definition
Activation Key / License File	The digital entitlement for Liferay DXP. Licenses vary based on clustering requirements and whether the workload is production or non-production.
Charts	Helm charts are a packaging format consisting of a collection of files that describe a related set of Kubernetes resources.
Cloud Provider Ready	A version of Cloud Native tooling tailored for a specific environment, whether it be a public hyperscaler (e.g., AWS Ready) or a specific Kubernetes distribution.
Cluster	A group of Liferay DXP pods sharing cache and state. In the CNE context, a Kubernetes Namespace is often treated as the boundary for a Liferay DXP cluster.
Environment	A logical deployment context (Production, UAT, Dev). Usually implemented as a dedicated Namespace with unique configurations and license files.
Infrastructure-Agnostic	Tooling or configurations designed to run on any standard Kubernetes distribution regardless of the underlying hardware or cloud provider.
Modules	Terraform modules are collections of resources managed together to provide an abstraction layer for infrastructure.
Namespace	A virtual cluster within a physical Kubernetes cluster used to isolate resources for specific environments (e.g., liferay-prd, liferay-dev).
Non-Production Pod	A pod intended for development, testing, or staging, configured with a developer license.xml.
Orchestrator	The underlying system (typically Kubernetes) responsible for automating the deployment and management of containerized Liferay DXP.
Pod	The smallest deployable unit in Kubernetes, consisting of one or more containers executing Liferay DXP.
Production Environment	A managed-service concept used in PaaS/SaaS offers. It is separate from the Production Pod limitation model used in Cloud Native.
Production Pod	A pod intended for production workloads, identified by a clustering-capable license.xml obtained through the Customer Portal.
Target Environment	The specific Kubernetes-based platform where the CNE tooling is being deployed (e.g., Vanilla K8s, OpenShift, or EKS).
Tooling (Tools)	Provisioning and deployment artifacts—including templates, Helm charts, Terraform modules, and scripts—used to deploy, configure, or operate Liferay DXP.