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
Causal Consistency	concept	Consistency Models	A model guaranteeing that operations which causally depend on one another are seen in the same order everywhere, while concurrent operations may be seen in any order.
Consistent Prefix Read	concept	Consistency Models	A guarantee that if a sequence of writes happens in a given order, a reader sees a prefix of that sequence — never an out-of-order subset.
Linearizability Atomic Consistency, Strong Consistency	concept	Consistency Models	The strongest single-object guarantee — every operation appears to take effect instantaneously at some point between its call and its return.
Read-Your-Writes Consistency Read-After-Write	concept	Consistency Models	A session guarantee that a client always sees its own updates, even when reads are served from replicas that may lag.