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

4 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Business Capability	concept	Business Architecture	What a business does, expressed stably and independently of how it currently does it or who is responsible.
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.
Two-Pizza Team	concept	Business Architecture	Amazon's heuristic that a team should be small enough to be fed by two pizzas, and — the substantive part — should own its service end to end.
Value Stream	concept	Business Architecture	The end-to-end sequence of activities that delivers a result to a customer, viewed across whatever departments and systems it happens to cross.