My new role has me paying attention to the Network side of cloud a lot more than I had to in the past. One thing I’ve noticed about Networking is that it has a lot of acronyms, and people that work in it tend to throw them out in context and move on. This is my collection of recent acronyms and their meanings.
I will continue to update this one as I come across additional relevant terms and acronyms.
- ARP:Â Address Resolution Protocol
- BFD: Bidirectional Forwarding Detection
- BGP: Border Gateway Protocol. The Protocol used for Dynamic Routing.
- CDP: Cisco Discovery Protocol.  Gives out IP addresses, and other basic host network information to host that requests it.
- DHCP:Â Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol Part one of PXE below.
- DNAT: Destination Network Address Translation
- DVR: Distance Vector Routing but can also be used to mean Distributed Virtual Routing
- DPDK: Data Plane Development Kit, libraries to accelerate packet processing workloads running on a wide variety of CPU architectures.
- East/West Traffic:Â Peer to peer traffic within a network, a datacenter, etc.FCoE: Fiber Channel Over Ethernet
- FIP: FCoE Initiation Protocol, or possibly “factory instrumentation protocol†or the “flux information process†but less likely in enterprise computing, as those are sensor net terms.
- GENEVE: Generic Network Virtualization Encapsulation
- GRE: Generic Routing Encapsulation
- IPAM:Â IP address Management.
- L3HA: Layer 3 High Availability. Using a
- LLDP: Link Layer Discovery Protocol
- ML2:Â Modular Layer 2. Part of Neutron, in OpenStack, to allow different Layer 2 implementations to interoperate.
- MPLS: Multiprotocol Label Switching
- NVGRE: Network Virtualization using Generic Routing Encapsulation
- ONAP:Â Open Network Automation Platform
- ODL:Â Open Daylight
- OVS: Open vSwitch where the little ‘v’ means virtual.
- OVN: Open Virtual Network
- North/South Traffic:Â Traffic into and out of a virtual stack, or out of a VPN to the Internet…anything that goes from “local” to “public” or the reverse.
- NVP: Network Virtualization Platform  which is also the name of the product for this from VMware (Nicera)
- PXE:Â Preboot Execution Environment
- QOS: Quality of Service. This term is used outside of networking, but it means something specific in Networking.
- SDN: Software Defined Networking
- SNAT: one of several specializations of Network Address Translation. Usually source NAT.
- SRIOV: Single Root Input/Output Virtualization more a hardware term than networking,
- SRX: Non-acronym but rather a product line of security routers from Juniper. I have one, model 220.
- STT: Stateless Transport Tunneling
- TCP:Â Transmission Control Protocol
- TLS: Transport Layer Security. A means of encrypting flow on top of TCP. Replaced SSL.
- TFTP: Trivial File Transfer Protocol. Part 2 of PXE, although now often replaced with HTTP. A lightweight, UDP, based way to fetch a file that can be implemented in firmware.
- UDP: User Datagram Protocol
- VIP:Â Virtual IP Address
- VLAN:Â Virtual Local Area Network.
- VRRP: Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol
- VXLAN: Virtual Extensible LAN
Thanks for the posting! I disagree that CDP is “part 1” of PXE. DHCP, the assignment of an IP Address and location of the TFTP/next-boot server should be part 1. CDP is just an information exchange protocol that lives below Layer3 (IP addresses). CDP is the Cisco version of LLDP.
Thanks for the catch. You are, of course, correct. I mangled that somehow, I suspect when editing and filling thing in.