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

8 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Amazon Dynamo: Always Writeable Dynamo Paper	case-study	Consistency Models	Amazon chose an always-writeable shopping cart with application-level conflict resolution, accepting merge complexity to guarantee that "add to cart" never fails.
AWS S3 2017: The Blast Radius of a Typo S3 us-east-1 Outage	case-study	Failure Modes	A mistyped command during routine debugging removed far more capacity than intended, and the affected subsystems had not been restarted in years.
Cloudflare 2019: One Regex, Global Outage Cloudflare WAF Outage	case-study	Load Shedding	A firewall rule containing a regular expression with catastrophic backtracking consumed CPU across Cloudflare's entire global network within seconds of deployment.
GitHub 2018: 43 Seconds of Partition, 24 Hours of Recovery GitHub October 2018 Incident	case-study	Leader Election	A 43-second network partition triggered an automated cross-region database failover, and reconciling the resulting divergence took over 24 hours.
Google Spanner: Buying Consistency With Time TrueTime, External Consistency	case-study	Distributed Transactions	Spanner achieves globally consistent transactions by bounding clock uncertainty with dedicated hardware and deliberately waiting out that uncertainty on commit.
LinkedIn: Kafka and the Unified Log The Log, Kafka Origin	case-study	Event Streaming	LinkedIn replaced a tangle of point-to-point data pipelines with a single durable log, turning an O(n²) integration problem into an O(n) one.
Netflix: From Hystrix to Adaptive Concurrency Limits Hystrix, Concurrency Limits	case-study	Circuit Breakers	Netflix's widely-copied circuit breaker library was retired in favour of limits that derive themselves from observed latency, because static thresholds go stale.
Roblox 2021: A Coordination Layer as a Single Point of Failure Roblox 73-Hour Outage	case-study	Service Discovery	A performance problem in the shared service-discovery cluster took the entire platform down for 73 hours, and its novelty made it extremely difficult to diagnose.