Terminology

2185 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 areas2185 Architecture Fundamentals77 Distributed Systems107 Data Architecture110 Cloud Architecture89 Networking88 API & Integration Architecture82 Reliability & Resilience75 Observability70 Performance & Capacity Engineering72 Security Architecture81 Cost Architecture & FinOps66 Business Architecture67 Architecture Communication67 Enterprise Architecture66 Legacy Modernization66 AI-Era Architecture69 Software Architecture & Engineering71 Architecture Patterns71 Architecture Decision-Making63 The Architect's Meta-Skills61 Delivery & Release Engineering66 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience70 Testing & Quality Architecture66 Data Platform Architecture64 Streaming & Real-Time Data69 Data Governance & Semantics69 Frontend & Experience Architecture66 Edge, Mobile & IoT68 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture65 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk64

Kind Any concept785 practice729 pattern362 metric125 case-study77 tool62 protocol45

77 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
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.
Spotify: Trading Kafka Operations for a Managed Service Spotify Event Delivery	case-study	Managed vs Self-Managed	Spotify moved its event delivery backbone from self-managed Kafka to a managed pub/sub service, choosing to buy back operational capacity rather than deepen expertise.
Stripe Webhooks: Delivering to Systems You Do Not Control Signed Webhooks	case-study	Webhooks	Outbound event delivery to arbitrary customer endpoints requires signing, retries over days, explicit at-least-once semantics and a replay interface.
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.
Stripe: Idempotency Keys as a Public API Contract Idempotency-Key Header	case-study	Idempotency Keys	Stripe made safe retry a documented, client-controlled property of its API, which is why network failures during payments do not produce duplicate charges.
Stripe: Versioning by Account Pinning Stripe API Versions	case-study	API Versioning	Stripe pins each account to the API version it first integrated against and maintains compatibility transformations, so integrations built years ago continue to work unchanged.
The Spotify Model and Why Its Authors Warned Against Copying It Squads and Tribes	case-study	Platform Team Topologies	An influential description of Spotify's team structure was widely adopted as a template, and people who were there have since cautioned that it was aspirational and never fully implemented.
TSB 2018: A Big-Bang Migration That Was Not Reversible TSB IT Migration	case-study	Cutover Planning	A UK bank moved millions of customer accounts to a new platform in a single weekend cutover, and the failure locked customers out for weeks.
Twitter Timelines: Fan-Out on Write, Except for Celebrities Timeline Fan-Out, Hybrid Fan-Out	case-study	Materialized Views	Precomputing every user's timeline at write time is fast to read and impossible for accounts with millions of followers, so the two approaches are combined.
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 DOMA: Structure Above Microservices Domain-Oriented Microservice Architecture	case-study	Microservices	Having reached thousands of microservices, Uber introduced domains and layers above them because independent services had recreated the coordination problem they were meant to solve.
Uber H3: Hexagonal Spatial Indexing H3, Hexagonal Hierarchical Index	case-study	Indexing	Uber built and open-sourced a hexagonal grid index because uniform neighbour distance matters when you are analysing supply and demand across space.
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.
Uber: Choosing a Database for Write Amplification Uber Postgres to MySQL	case-study	Technology Selection	Uber publicly documented moving from Postgres to MySQL for their workload, and the reasoning is a useful lesson in evaluating a datastore against your actual access pattern.
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.