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Terminology

2205 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 areas2205 Architecture Fundamentals77 Distributed Systems107 Data Architecture110 Cloud Architecture94 Networking88 API & Integration Architecture82 Reliability & Resilience75 Observability70 Performance & Capacity Engineering72 Security Architecture86 Cost Architecture & FinOps71 Business Architecture67 Architecture Communication67 Enterprise Architecture66 Legacy Modernization71 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 concept794 practice734 pattern368 metric125 case-study77 tool62 protocol45

794 terms shown.

Term Kind Topic What it is
Portability Tax Portability Premium, Cloud-Neutrality Cost concept Multi-Cloud The recurring cost of keeping a workload provider-neutral - the managed-service premium forgone, the lowest-common-denominator ceiling and the platform headcount - which routinely exceeds the one-off migration…
Predicate Pushdown Filter Pushdown, Pushdown Optimisation concept Data Virtualisation Sending a filter to the layer that holds the data rather than fetching rows and filtering afterwards, which is the difference between reading megabytes and reading a table.
Preventive Control Placement concept Guardrails vs Gates Choosing where in the lifecycle a control acts — at authoring, at admission or after the fact — which determines both its strength and its cost.
Privacy Enhancing Technology PETs concept Privacy-Enhancing Technologies Techniques that allow useful computation over data without exposing the underlying records — differential privacy, secure multi-party computation, homomorphic encryption, federated learning.
Private Connectivity PrivateLink, Private Endpoint, Service Endpoint concept Private Connectivity Reaching a cloud or partner service over private address space rather than the public internet, without exposing the consumer's network in return.
Private Endpoint PrivateLink, VPC Endpoint concept Private Connectivity A private network address inside your VPC that reaches a managed service directly, without traversing the internet or a NAT gateway.
Privilege Creep Access Accumulation, Permission Sprawl concept Identity & Access Management The gradual accumulation of access as people change roles without losing prior permissions, producing long-tenured staff with far more access than anyone intended.
Process Model concept Business Processes A representation of how work actually flows through an organisation, distinguished from a capability by describing sequence, actors and handoffs.
Process Ownership Gap Unowned Workflow, Orphaned Business Process concept Orchestration vs Choreography The condition in which every step of a multi-service process has an owning team but the process itself has none, so a stall produces no error, no deadline breach and no page.
Processor Instruction Boundary Controller-Processor Line, Own-Purpose Test concept Third-Party Risk The line at which a vendor stops acting only on your documented instructions and starts pursuing purposes of its own - which decides your lawful basis, your consent gating and your breach clock.
Producer Obligation concept Data Contracts What a data contract binds the producing team to do, and — crucially — what happens in their pipeline when they are about to break it.
Product Thinking concept Product Thinking Treating what you build as something with users whose problems it must solve — applied to internal platforms as much as to customer-facing products.
Production Parity Gap concept Environment Parity The enumerated list of ways a pre-production environment differs from production, which is the list of defect classes it cannot catch.
Prompt Injection concept AI-Era Architecture An attack in which text from an untrusted source is interpreted by the model as instructions rather than as data.
Prop Interface Stability concept Component Contracts The commitment a component makes about its props, slots, events and emitted structure — including the parts consumers depend on that were never intended as interface.
Provenance Parity History Parity, Build-Path Parity concept Environment Parity Similarity between environments in how they were built and changed over time - the parity dimension that decides whether a rehearsal transfers, and the one that manifests and version numbers cannot show.
Provisional Result Restatement, Unsettled Aggregate concept Watermarks & Late Data An aggregate emitted before its window is definitively complete, which may be corrected when late events arrive - correct behaviour that destroys trust when it is not made visible.
Provisioned vs Serverless Capacity concept Cloud Databases Paying for a fixed database size continuously, versus paying for capacity consumed with automatic scaling — a crossover decision driven by duty cycle.
Proxy Buffering concept Reverse Proxies Whether a reverse proxy accumulates a response before forwarding it, which protects the backend from slow clients but breaks streaming.
Purpose Limitation Use Constraint, Purpose Binding, Secondary Use Control concept Lawful Basis & Purpose Limitation The requirement that personal data collected for one stated purpose is not used for another, which architecture enforces by binding a purpose to every dataset and evaluating it at the point of use rather than …
Push Token Decay Stale Registration Token, Push Target Rot concept Push & Background Work The steady accumulation of push targets that no longer reach a device - which inflates fan-out cost and makes delivery metrics describe a list rather than an audience.
Quasi-Identifier Set Indirect Identifiers, Re-identification Vector concept Pseudonymisation The combination of attributes that singles out an individual even after direct identifiers are removed - which is why deleting names and ids does not anonymise a dataset, and why free text and behavioural hist…
Query Plan Execution Plan, EXPLAIN concept Data Architecture The database's chosen strategy for executing a query, and the first thing to look at when one is slow.
Query Plan Regression concept Database Performance A sudden latency increase caused by the database optimiser choosing a different execution plan for an unchanged query, typically after statistics or data volume change.
Query Surface Volatility concept SQL vs NoSQL How fast a product invents query shapes it did not have before - the workload fact that decides whether a purpose-built physical layout or a general query planner is the cheaper bet.
Queueing Delay concept Queueing Theory The time a request spends waiting rather than being served, which rises non-linearly as utilisation approaches capacity.
Quorum concept Consensus Protocols The minimum number of replicas that must respond for an operation to be considered committed, sized so that any read set and any write set must overlap.
Re-architect vs Rebuild concept Legacy Modernization Restructuring an existing system incrementally versus writing a replacement from scratch — and the strong evidence that incremental wins.
Re-Identification Risk concept Pseudonymisation The probability that pseudonymised data can be linked back to individuals, which is what keeps such data within the scope of data protection law.
Read Timeout Socket Timeout concept Timeouts & Deadlines The bound on how long a client waits for response data after a connection is established — distinct from the connect timeout, and the one that usually matters.
Read-Your-Writes Consistency Read-After-Write concept Consistency Models A guarantee that a client always sees its own prior writes, even in a system that is otherwise eventually consistent.
Rearchitecture Threshold concept Refactoring & Re-architecting The conditions under which rebuilding a system is justified, given that it is the most expensive treatment and is chosen far more often than it is warranted.
Rebalance Cost Partition Reassignment Duration, State Restore Time concept Stateful Stream Processing The time a stateful consumer group is unavailable while partitions are reassigned and state restored - proportional to state size, incurred on every deployment, and invisible in throughput and lag metrics.
Reclamation Notice Window Interruption Notice, Preemption Warning concept Spot & Interruptible Capacity The seconds between a provider announcing it is taking an instance back and actually taking it, which sets a hard upper bound on how much work a shutdown handler can finish and therefore how large a unit of wo…
Reconnect Storm Thundering Herd on Reconnect, Connection Stampede, Recovery Amplification concept WebSockets & Realtime The synchronised burst of clients re-establishing connections after a disruption, which is far more expensive than steady-state traffic and routinely turns a brief network fault into a prolonged self-sustainin…
Reconnect Storm Connection Stampede concept Distributed Systems The synchronised reconnection of a large population of clients after a disruption, which routinely causes a larger outage than the disruption itself.
Recovery Cost Per Unit Remediation Cost, Recoverability, Time-to-Repair Per Node concept Fault Isolation The effort required to restore one affected instance, device or tenant - the multiplier that decides whether a wide blast radius is an incident or a catastrophe, and the factor most often left out of risk asse…
Recovery Load Restoration Surge, Post-Incident Backlog, Catch-Up Traffic concept Rollback & Forward Fix The traffic generated by a system returning to service - reconnections, queued work, cold caches, retries - which is qualitatively different from steady-state load and routinely turns a short incident into a l…
Redundancy concept Redundancy Multiple instances of a component so that one failing does not fail the system — valuable exactly to the extent the failures are uncorrelated.
Reference Architecture concept Reference Architectures A pre-decided template for a recurring class of solution, capturing the decisions that do not need making again.
Reference Data concept Reference Data The slowly-changing shared vocabularies — country codes, currencies, product categories, tax rates — whose inconsistency causes disproportionate trouble.
Reference Data Drift Code List Divergence, Static Data Staleness concept Data Migration Strategies The divergence between a source system's lookup tables and the copy taken at the start of a long migration, which turns into silent transaction rejections in the new system months later.
Reference Model Reference Architecture concept Reference Models A shared conceptual frame — layers, tiers, viewpoints, capability maps — that gives a conversation vocabulary, and whose limits are frequently forgotten.
Refresh Token concept Tokens & JWTs A long-lived credential used solely to obtain new short-lived access tokens, so sessions can persist without long-lived access tokens circulating.
Regulatory Architecture concept Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture Designing so regulatory obligations are properties of the system rather than commitments the organisation makes on its behalf.
Regulatory Constraint concept Business Architecture A legal requirement that removes design options — and one that must be established early, because it is not negotiable and is expensive to retrofit.
Regulatory Constraint as Architectural Driver concept Regulatory Constraints A compliance obligation that removes design options entirely, and therefore belongs among the first constraints identified rather than checked at the end.
Regulatory Reporting Pipeline concept Regulatory Reporting Pipelines A data pipeline whose output goes to a regulator, where correctness, reproducibility and demonstrable lineage matter more than latency or elegance.
Relationship-Based Access Control ReBAC, Graph Authorization concept Authorization Expressing permissions as relationships between subjects and objects, with inheritance and group expansion as rules over the graph, rather than as attributes on rows.
Release Tarball Divergence Archive-Repository Gap, Distributed-Source Divergence concept Supply-Chain Provenance The gap between a project's reviewed source repository and the source archive that downstream actually builds, which is a trust boundary most supply-chain controls assume does not exist.
Release Unit Promotable Set, Deployment Bundle concept Delivery & Release Engineering The complete set of inputs a promotion must move together - artefact digest, configuration revision, flag defaults and schema version - because promoting only the artefact leaves the rest as untested variables.
Reliability versus Complexity concept Reliability vs Complexity Mechanisms added for reliability introduce their own failure modes — so past a point, more machinery makes a system less reliable.
Render Location Decision concept Rendering Strategies Where HTML is produced — build time, server, edge or browser — chosen per route by how personalised and how cacheable that route is.
Rendering Strategy SSR, CSR, SSG, ISR concept Rendering Strategies The decision about where and when HTML is produced — build time, server request time, or in the browser — which drives performance, cost and complexity.
Replay Determinism Projection Purity, Deterministic Fold concept Event Sourcing The property that folding an event log through a projection handler yields the same state every time it is run, which is what makes an event log rebuildable rather than merely stored.
Replication concept Replication Keeping copies of data on multiple machines for availability, read scaling and locality — and the lag that comes with all three.
Replication Slot Retention Slot Lag, WAL Retention Pressure concept CDC to Stream The write-ahead log a database must keep because a change-data-capture consumer has not yet confirmed it, which turns a slow or stopped CDC pipeline into a disk-space failure on the primary database.
Reprocessing Window concept Backfill & Reprocessing How far back a pipeline can be replayed, set by the shortest retention anywhere along the path rather than by intent.
Repurchase Displacement Cost Buy-Instead-Of-Build Migration Load, SaaS Substitution Overhead concept The Six Rs The data migration, process change, integration rebuild and customisation retirement that replacing a bespoke application with a purchased product creates, none of which appears in the licence comparison that …
Request-Reply and Fire-and-Forget concept Sync vs Async The two interaction shapes available between components, differing in whether the caller waits for a result and therefore in whether availability compounds.