Terminology

454 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 areas454 Architecture Fundamentals16 Distributed Systems73 Data Architecture71 Cloud Architecture55 Networking13 API & Integration Architecture17 Reliability & Resilience16 Observability14 Performance & Capacity Engineering13 Security Architecture50 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 concept166 practice107 pattern93 case-study26 tool26 protocol22 metric14

6 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.