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

39 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Active-Active vs Active-Passive	concept	Multi-Region Architecture	Whether all regions serve traffic simultaneously, or one serves while another waits to take over — a choice about which failure mode you would rather have.
Availability Zone AZ	concept	Cloud Architecture	One or more physically separate data centres inside a cloud region, with independent power, cooling and network, connected by low-latency links.
Availability Zone Independence	concept	Availability Zones	The property that a failure in one zone does not propagate to another, and the design work needed to actually benefit from it.
Blast Radius	concept	Cloud Architecture	The set of things that break, or become reachable, when one component fails or is compromised.
Block Storage Persistent Disk, EBS	concept	Cloud Storage	A virtual disk attached to one instance at a time, presented as raw blocks and formatted with a filesystem — the storage databases and stateful workloads run on.
Burst Capacity Cloud Bursting, Overflow Capacity	concept	Cloud Architecture	Capacity acquired quickly for short-lived demand above the baseline, deliberately priced higher than owned capacity in exchange for immediate availability.
Burstable Instance T-series, B-series	concept	Compute Models	An instance that provides a low baseline CPU allocation and accrues credits while idle, spendable for short periods of full performance.
Cloud Databases	concept	Cloud Databases	Managed and cloud-native database services — where the operational relief is real, and where the abstraction leaks.
Cloud Storage	concept	Cloud Storage	Object, block and file storage — with different durability, latency and cost models, and an egress bill that shapes architecture more than most designs admit.
Compute Models	concept	Compute Models	Virtual machines, containers, serverless functions and dedicated hardware — chosen by workload shape rather than by modernity.
Container Image	concept	Containers	A layered, content-addressed filesystem bundle plus metadata, from which containers are instantiated — immutable by construction and identified by digest.
Control Plane and Data Plane	concept	Cloud Architecture	The separation between the machinery that makes changes to a system and the machinery that serves its traffic.
Control Plane vs Data Plane	concept	Cloud Architecture	The separation between the system that manages configuration and the system that serves requests, which have very different reliability requirements.
Cross-Zone Data Transfer	concept	Availability Zones	Charges incurred when data moves between availability zones within a region — invisible on architecture diagrams and a recurring surprise on cloud bills.
Cross-Zone Load Balancing	concept	Load Balancing	Whether a load balancer node distributes traffic to targets in all zones or only its own — a setting that affects both balance and data transfer cost.
Durability vs Availability	concept	Cloud Storage	Two different storage guarantees — whether data survives, and whether it can be reached right now — routinely conflated because both are quoted in nines.
Edge Computing	concept	Edge Computing	Running computation at points of presence near users rather than in a central region, trading capability for round-trip latency.
Edge Function	concept	Edge Computing	Code executed at a CDN point of presence close to the user, in a constrained, fast-starting runtime, typically to modify or route a request before it reaches an origin.
Fragmentation Cost Bin-Packing Loss, Scheduling Fragmentation	concept	Compute Models	The capacity that exists in aggregate but cannot be used because it is scattered across nodes in pieces too small for the jobs that need it - the dominant inefficiency in indivisible-resource scheduling.
Gang Scheduling Co-scheduling, All-or-Nothing Allocation	concept	Compute Models	Allocating every resource a job needs simultaneously or not at all, so tightly-coupled distributed work cannot deadlock holding a partial allocation.
Instance Family	concept	Compute Models	A group of instance types sharing a resource profile — general purpose, compute optimised, memory optimised, storage optimised, accelerated — chosen by which resource the workload actually exhausts first.
Kubernetes Resource Requests and Limits	concept	Kubernetes	The declared minimum a container is guaranteed and the maximum it may consume, which drive scheduling, eviction and throttling in ways that are easy to get wrong.
Managed Service	concept	Cloud Architecture	A capability the provider operates — provisioning, patching, backup, scaling and failover — leaving you the configuration and the data.
Managed Service Upgrade Window	concept	Managed Services	The period during which a provider may apply patches or version upgrades to a managed service, usually involving a failover or brief unavailability.
Managed Services	concept	Managed Services	Paying a provider to operate a component — usually the right default, with a small number of genuine reasons to self-manage.
Multi-Cloud	concept	Cloud Architecture	Deliberately running across more than one cloud provider — a decision with a much higher cost than the lock-in it is usually adopted to avoid.
Object Storage	concept	Cloud Architecture	Flat, HTTP-addressable storage for immutable blobs with rich metadata — effectively unlimited, cheap, and not a filesystem.
Pod	concept	Kubernetes	The smallest deployable unit in Kubernetes — one or more containers that share a network namespace, storage volumes and a lifecycle, scheduled together on one node.
Point-in-Time Recovery PITR	concept	Backup Strategies	Restoring a database to any moment within a retention window by replaying transaction logs onto a base backup, rather than only to a snapshot boundary.
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.
Resource Requests and Limits	concept	Kubernetes	The declared minimum a container is guaranteed (request) and the maximum it may consume (limit) — the two numbers that determine scheduling, packing and throttling.
Serverless	concept	Cloud Architecture	A model where the provider allocates and scales compute per request, and you are billed for execution rather than for provisioned capacity.
Serverless Cold Start	concept	Serverless	The additional latency when a function invocation must allocate and initialise a new execution environment rather than reusing a warm one.
Serverless Compute in Practice Functions as a Service, FaaS	concept	Serverless	Compute billed per invocation with no capacity to manage — excellent for bursty low-duty-cycle work, expensive and constrained for sustained load.
Service Quota Service Limit	concept	Cloud Governance	A per-account, per-region cap on how much of a resource may be used — a common and easily-avoided cause of scaling failures and DR failures.
Shared Responsibility Model	concept	Managed Services	The division of duties between provider and customer, which shifts with the service model and is routinely misunderstood in the customer's disfavour.
Static Stability Fail Static, Configuration Inertia, Control-Plane Independence	concept	Cloud Architecture	Designing a system so it continues operating correctly on its existing configuration during a failure, requiring no control-plane action to survive - because control planes are the part most likely to be unava…
Terraform State IaC State File	concept	Infrastructure as Code	The file mapping declared resources to real infrastructure, without which the tool cannot tell what it already created — and which becomes critical infrastructure in its own right.
Zonal vs Regional Services	concept	Availability Zones	Whether a cloud resource lives in one availability zone or is inherently spread across several — a property that determines what a zone failure takes with it.