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
Context Window	concept	AI-Era Architecture	The maximum number of tokens a model can attend to in one request, holding the system prompt, history, retrieved context, tools and the answer.
Embedding	concept	AI-Era Architecture	A dense numeric vector representing a piece of content, positioned so that semantically similar content sits nearby.
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.