Ability. A named permission attached to a token, such as licenses:write. Decides what a token may do.
At-least-once delivery. The guarantee a queue gives: a job runs one or more times, never zero. The reason every job must be safe to run twice.
Backoff. The wait between retries. Usually grows with each attempt.
Batch. A group of queued jobs dispatched together, with shared progress.
Circuit breaker. A guard that stops calling a dependency after repeated failures, for a while, and fails fast.
Consumer. A system that calls the API. In this book, also the Eloquent model that represents one.
Contract. Either an interface in code, or the promise an API makes to its consumers about requests and responses.
Data transfer object. See typed object.
Driver. One implementation of a contract for one provider.
Envelope. The outer structure of a response. In this API, a data key.
Error budget. The amount of failure an objective allows over its window.
Facade. A static-looking entry point to an object in the container.
Fingerprint. A hash of a request, used to tell whether two requests with the same idempotency key are really the same.
FormRequest. A class that validates and authorizes a request before the controller runs.
Gate. A named authorization check that isn’t tied to a model.
Heartbeat. A signal sent after a task succeeds, so that its absence can raise an alarm.
Hub. The one service that orchestrates work across several others.
Idempotency key. A value a consumer sends with a request so that retries of the same operation are recognized.
Idempotent. Safe to repeat. Doing it twice leaves the same state as doing it once.
Leaf. A service that owns one outside provider and is called by the hub.
Manager. Laravel’s base class for choosing between several drivers. This API has one driver and doesn’t use it.
Natural key. A value from the real world that identifies a thing, such as a domain name.
Operator. A caller whose token has the consumers:manage ability.
Policy. A class that decides which records a caller may act on.
Provider. An outside service this API depends on. In this book, Statamic.
Resource. A class that turns an object into the JSON a consumer sees.
Scoped binding. A container binding that lives for one request or one job.
Scoped route binding. A nested route parameter that must belong to its parent. Not an authorization check.
Service level objective. A target for a measurement over a window, agreed in advance.
Soft delete. Marking a row as deleted without removing it, so that it can be restored.
Sunset. The date after which a deprecated API version stops answering.
Trace ID. A value attached to every log line for one operation, across requests, jobs, and services.
Typed object. A small immutable class holding data that came from outside your database. Often called a data transfer object.
Webhook. A request this API sends to a consumer’s URL when something happens.