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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

4 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.
Retail Peak: Designing for Black Friday Black Friday Readiness case-study Peak Event Readiness A retailer's annual peak can be an order of magnitude above normal, arrives in minutes, and cannot be rescheduled — which makes it a distinct engineering discipline.
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.