We’ve compiled a full list of commonly encountered IT terminology that will help you better understand the industry and how it works. By familiarizing yourself with basic computer terms and definitions, you’ll allow yourself to understand manuals, descriptions, and everyday jargon necessary to fully grasp IT products and services.
You’ll find our tech glossary is conveniently laid out below in alphabetical order with an easy navigation interface so you can quickly reference words related to technology.
In addition to our tech terms, you can also find other resources to help you learn more about the role of technology in modern industry, including blogs, whitepapers, and case studies. Though our list of IT terms to know is expansive, if you have any further questions regarding things to know about technology, please contact us.
YouTube is the world’s largest online video-sharing and social media platform, owned by Google. Launched in 2005, YouTube allows users to upload, view, share, and comment on videos across a wide array of categories, including entertainment, education, news, and more. From an IT perspective, YouTube relies on complex technologies such as large-scale data storage, content delivery networks (CDNs), video encoding and transcoding, machine learning algorithms for recommendations, and robust security measures to handle billions of daily views and uploads. It serves as a prime example of scalable, cloud-based infrastructure supporting global content distribution.
In cloud computing, Yield Management refers to the dynamic allocation and pricing of computing resources based on real-time demand and supply. Cloud service providers use yield management strategies to optimize resource utilization, balance workloads, and maximize revenue. By adjusting prices or resource availability, providers can encourage users to consume resources during off-peak times or scale back during peak demand, ensuring efficient operation of data centers and cost-effective service delivery to customers.
Yottahertz (YHz) is a unit of frequency equal to one septillion hertz, or 102410^{24}1024 hertz. While not commonly used in practical applications due to its extraordinarily large magnitude, the term is relevant in theoretical physics and high-frequency phenomena discussions. In the context of computing and telecommunications, frequencies are typically measured in kilohertz (kHz), megahertz (MHz), gigahertz (GHz), and occasionally terahertz (THz), which are significantly smaller than yottahertz.
YANG is a data modeling language used to model configuration and state data manipulated by the Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF), RESTCONF, and other network management protocols. It provides a standardized way to define the data sent over network management protocols, enabling interoperability between network devices from different vendors. YANG plays a crucial role in software-defined networking (SDN) and network automation by facilitating the development of programmable networks and simplifying the management of complex network infrastructures.
YCbCr is a color space used in digital video and image compression systems, representing color as one luma component (Y) and two chroma components (Cb and Cr). The Y component corresponds to luminance (brightness), while Cb and Cr represent the blue-difference and red-difference chroma information, respectively. By separating luminance from chrominance, YCbCr allows for more efficient compression techniques, as the human eye is more sensitive to changes in brightness than color, enabling reduced bandwidth without significant loss of image quality.
YACC stands for Yet Another Compiler Compiler, a tool used in Unix systems for generating parsers, which are components of compilers that process and understand the syntax of programming languages. Developed by Stephen C. Johnson at Bell Labs in the 1970s, YACC takes a formal description of a programming language’s grammar and produces C code for the parser. It has influenced many descendants and equivalents in other languages, serving as a foundational tool in compiler construction and language development.
Yeoman is an open-source scaffolding tool that streamlines the setup of new web applications. It provides generators that create the necessary files and boilerplate code for a project, following best practices and standards. Yeoman integrates with build tools like Grunt and Gulp, and package managers like NPM and Bower, to automate tasks such as testing, linting, and optimization. By accelerating project initialization and enforcing consistency, Yeoman helps developers focus on writing code rather than configuring their development environments.
YUM is an open-source command-line package management utility for RPM-compatible Linux operating systems, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and Fedora. The acronym stands for Yellowdog Updater, Modified, originating from the Yellow Dog Linux distribution. YUM simplifies the process of installing, updating, and removing software packages by automatically resolving and handling dependencies. It enables users to manage packages from various repositories, ensuring that systems are up-to-date with the latest software and security patches.
YARN is a cluster management technology and resource scheduler introduced in Apache Hadoop 2.0. Standing for Yet Another Resource Negotiator, YARN separates the resource management and job scheduling functions from the data processing component MapReduce. It allows multiple data processing engines (like Spark, Tez, and Flink) to handle data stored in a single platform, enabling interactive querying, real-time analytics, and batch processing. YARN enhances the scalability and efficiency of Hadoop clusters by optimizing resource utilization and supporting diverse workloads.
In programming languages like Python and JavaScript, yield is a keyword used within a function to pause its execution and return a value to the caller, while maintaining the function’s state for subsequent resumption. Functions that use yield are known as generator functions. They generate a sequence of values over time, producing items one at a time only when required (lazy evaluation). This approach is memory-efficient, especially when working with large datasets or streams, as it doesn’t require storing the entire dataset in memory.