Terminology

384 terms, tools, patterns and metrics an architect is expected to use precisely. Each one gets a short explanation of what it is, and — where it matters — what it is commonly confused with. Search filters as you type; the column headers sort.

All areas384 Architecture Fundamentals16 Distributed Systems73 Data Architecture71 Cloud Architecture17 Networking13 API & Integration Architecture17 Reliability & Resilience16 Observability14 Performance & Capacity Engineering13 Security Architecture18 Cost Architecture & FinOps12 Business Architecture9 Architecture Communication8 Enterprise Architecture8 Legacy Modernization11 AI-Era Architecture15 Software Architecture & Engineering19 Architecture Patterns15 Architecture Decision-Making11 The Architect's Meta-Skills8

Kind Any concept136 practice90 pattern81 case-study26 protocol19 tool19 metric13

26 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Airbnb's Service-Oriented Migration	case-study	Legacy Modernization	Airbnb decomposed a large Rails monolith by first extracting a unified data-access layer, so that services were built on owned data rather than on shared database tables.
Booking.com's Experimentation Platform	case-study	Business Architecture	Booking.com runs over a thousand concurrent experiments and treats the ability to test any change safely as a platform capability rather than a product feature.
Capital One's Data Centre Exit	case-study	Enterprise Architecture	A major US bank closed all eight of its data centres and moved fully to public cloud, treating governance automation as the enabling technology rather than a constraint.
Discord's Message Store Migrations	case-study	Data Architecture	Discord moved from MongoDB to Cassandra to ScyllaDB as message volume grew from millions to trillions, each time for a specific and different reason.
Dropbox's Move Off S3 Magic Pocket	case-study	Cost & FinOps	Dropbox moved the majority of its file storage off Amazon S3 onto custom infrastructure, reporting savings that its S-1 filing put at roughly $75 million over two years.
eBay's Architectural Generations	case-study	Legacy Modernization	eBay rewrote its core platform several times across its first decade, each time because the previous generation had hit a limit that could not be tuned away.
Etsy's Continuous Deployment	case-study	Software Architecture	Etsy moved from infrequent, risky releases to dozens of deploys a day, demonstrating that deployment frequency and stability improve together rather than trading off.
Figma's Postgres Sharding	case-study	Data Architecture	Figma delayed sharding for years using replicas and vertical partitioning, then sharded Postgres horizontally without downtime using logical shards and a proxy layer.
Google Maps and Planetary-Scale Spatial Serving	case-study	Performance & Capacity	Map serving is fast because almost nothing is computed on request — the world is precomputed into a pyramid of tiles, and space is indexed onto a one-dimensional curve.
Instagram's Early Scaling	case-study	Architecture Fundamentals	Instagram reached tens of millions of users on Django and PostgreSQL with a handful of engineers, by deliberately choosing boring technology and doing the simple thing first.
LinkedIn and the Origin of Kafka	case-study	API & Integration	Kafka was built to replace point-to-point data integration between many systems with a single durable log that any system could publish to and any number could read.
Monzo's Microservice Estate	case-study	Software Architecture	Monzo runs a bank on well over a thousand microservices, and the interesting engineering is in the platform and network isolation that makes that number survivable.
Netflix Open Connect	case-study	Networking	Netflix built its own CDN and placed appliances inside ISP networks, turning the most expensive part of its cost structure into hardware it controls.
Netflix's Recommendation Architecture	case-study	Data Architecture	Netflix splits personalisation into offline, nearline and online layers so that expensive computation happens ahead of time and the request path stays fast.
Pinterest's MySQL Sharding	case-study	Data Architecture	Pinterest sharded MySQL by embedding the shard ID inside every primary key, making any object's location computable from its ID alone with no lookup service.
Prime Video's Move Back to a Monolith Prime Video VQA Rearchitecture	case-study	Architecture Patterns	Amazon Prime Video consolidated a serverless, distributed audio/video monitoring service into a single process and reported a 90% cost reduction — the most-cited example of microservices being the wrong tool.
Salesforce's Metadata-Driven Multi-Tenancy	case-study	Data Architecture	Salesforce serves every customer from shared infrastructure with a single physical schema, storing customer-specific data structures as metadata rather than as separate tables.
Shopify's Pods and Modular Monolith	case-study	Architecture Patterns	Shopify handles Black Friday scale with isolated pods — complete stacks each serving a subset of merchants — while keeping the application itself a deliberately modular monolith.
Slack's Cellular Migration	case-study	Cloud Architecture	After repeated availability-zone-level incidents, Slack rebuilt its infrastructure into per-zone cells with the ability to drain traffic away from a failing zone in minutes.
Spotify's Squad Model and Its Retrospective	case-study	Business Architecture	The widely-copied Spotify model of squads, tribes, chapters and guilds was a snapshot that did not work as documented even at Spotify — a caution about importing organisational design.
Stripe's API Versioning	case-study	API & Integration	Stripe pins each account to the API version current when it integrated and transforms requests and responses between versions internally, so integrations never break and the core stays modern.
Twitter's Timeline Fan-Out	case-study	Performance & Capacity	Twitter precomputes each user's timeline at write time but handles very-high-follower accounts at read time, because neither strategy alone survives both ends of the distribution.
Uber's Domain-Oriented Microservice Architecture DOMA	case-study	Software Architecture	After growing to roughly 2,200 microservices, Uber grouped them into domains behind gateways with strict dependency layering, to recover the comprehensibility that fine-grained decomposition had cost.
Uber's H3 Spatial Index	case-study	Data Architecture	Uber indexes the world with hexagons rather than squares, because uniform neighbour distance makes supply, demand and pricing computations correct as well as fast.
WhatsApp's Small-Team Scale	case-study	Performance & Capacity	WhatsApp served hundreds of millions of users with a few dozen engineers by matching one technology choice precisely to the workload and refusing to add anything else.
Zoom's Pandemic Scale-Up	case-study	Cloud Architecture	Zoom grew from around 10 million to over 300 million daily meeting participants in roughly three months, absorbed by a hybrid architecture and a distributed media routing design.