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
DoorDash: Decomposing a Python Monolith DoorDash Microservices Migration	case-study	Service Boundaries	DoorDash moved off a Python monolith as growth made deployment risk and scaling limits unmanageable, and used a facade to migrate incrementally.
Etsy's Continuous Deployment	case-study	Software Architecture	Etsy moved from infrequent, risky releases to dozens of deploys a day, demonstrating that deployment frequency and stability improve together rather than trading off.
Knight Capital: $440 Million in 45 Minutes Knight Capital Incident	case-study	Feature Flags	A deployment that reached seven of eight servers, combined with a reused feature flag, activated dormant test code and destroyed the company in three quarters of an hour.
LinkedIn Project Inversion: Stopping to Fix the Road Inversion	case-study	Technical Debt	LinkedIn halted feature development for roughly two months to rebuild its deployment and development infrastructure, because the tooling had become the constraint on everything.
Monzo's Microservice Estate	case-study	Software Architecture	Monzo runs a bank on well over a thousand microservices, and the interesting engineering is in the platform and network isolation that makes that number survivable.
Shopify: A Monolith That Scaled Packwerk, Shopify Pods	case-study	Modular Monolith	Shopify kept its Rails monolith and invested in enforced internal boundaries and horizontal sharding, rather than decomposing into microservices.
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'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.