DevOps Beginner

What is Semantic Versioning?

A versioning scheme using MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH numbers that communicates the nature of changes in each release.

Semantic Versioning (SemVer) uses three numbers: MAJOR (breaking changes), MINOR (new features, backward compatible), PATCH (bug fixes, backward compatible). Example: 2.4.1 → 2.5.0 (new feature) → 3.0.0 (breaking change).

Pre-release versions use suffixes: 1.0.0-alpha, 1.0.0-beta.1, 1.0.0-rc.1. SemVer enables dependency management tools to automatically determine compatible updates. Most package managers (npm, pip, cargo) rely on SemVer.

Related Terms

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment — automated practices for building, testing, and deploying code changes.

An architectural style where an application is composed of small, independent services that communicate over APIs.

An open-source automation server for building, testing, and deploying software through configurable CI/CD pipelines.

The ability to understand a system's internal state from its external outputs through metrics, logs, and traces.

The acceptable amount of unreliability allowed for a service, calculated as 100% minus the Service Level Objective.

An infrastructure layer that handles service-to-service communication, providing load balancing, encryption, and observability.

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