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

28 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.
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.
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.
Configuration Drift	concept	Infrastructure as Code	Divergence between the infrastructure described in code and the infrastructure actually running, usually caused by manual changes.
Connection Draining Deregistration Delay	concept	Load Balancing	The period during which a load balancer stops sending new requests to an instance while allowing in-flight ones to complete before it is removed.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.