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

3 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
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.
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.
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.