Portfolio ↗

Terminology

2225 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 areas2225 Architecture Fundamentals77 Distributed Systems107 Data Architecture110 Cloud Architecture94 Networking88 API & Integration Architecture82 Reliability & Resilience75 Observability70 Performance & Capacity Engineering72 Security Architecture86 Cost Architecture & FinOps71 Business Architecture67 Architecture Communication67 Enterprise Architecture66 Legacy Modernization71 AI-Era Architecture74 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 Architecture69 Streaming & Real-Time Data69 Data Governance & Semantics74 Frontend & Experience Architecture66 Edge, Mobile & IoT68 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture65 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk69
Kind Any concept801 practice736 pattern377 metric127 case-study77 tool62 protocol45

30 terms shown.

Term Kind Topic What it is
Attestation Freshness Nonce-Bound Quote, Replay-Resistant Attestation concept Edge Security & Attestation The property that a hardware attestation can only be used in the exchange that requested it - without which a captured measurement is a reusable bearer token for the whole fleet.
Background Work on Mobile concept Push & Background Work Work scheduled outside the foreground session, which mobile operating systems aggressively restrict to protect battery life.
Best Effort Delivery concept Push & Background Work The guarantee push notification services actually offer — which is none — and the design consequences of building on a channel that may silently drop.
Clock Drift concept Physical-World Failure Modes Device clocks diverging from real time, which corrupts ordering, expires certificates early or late, and produces data that appears to arrive from the past.
Cold Start at the Edge concept Edge Functions The initialisation delay when a request reaches a location with no warm instance, which at the edge occurs far more often because traffic is spread across many locations.
Compute Tier Placement concept Edge Compute Topologies Deciding which of on-device, on-premises, metro, regional or central compute a workload belongs to, from its latency, data volume and autonomy requirements.
Convergence Without Coordination concept CRDTs The property that replicas applying the same set of updates in any order reach the same state, which is what removes the need for a central arbiter.
CRDT Conflict-Free Replicated Data Type concept CRDTs A data structure whose concurrent updates always merge to the same result regardless of order, removing the need for coordination or conflict resolution.
Device Identity concept Device Identity Establishing and maintaining a trustworthy identity for each device in a fleet — including the parts that must work for a decade without physical access.
Device Telemetry at Scale concept Device Telemetry at Scale The volume problem created by many devices each emitting small frequent messages, where the answer is filtering at the edge rather than ingesting everything.
Device-Side Refusal Local Precondition Check, The Device Decides concept OTA Updates The rule that a device must refuse an unsafe instruction regardless of what the server commanded, because the server does not know the device's physical state.
Edge Compute Topology concept Edge Compute Topologies The choice of where computation sits along the path from device to region, trading latency and autonomy against manageability and consistency.
Edge Data Consistency concept Edge Data Consistency The consistency model available when data is replicated to many edge locations, where strong consistency would eliminate the latency benefit that motivated the edge.
Edge Security and Attestation concept Edge Security & Attestation Establishing that a device is running expected software and has not been tampered with — the trust foundation when you do not control the physical environment.
Edge, Mobile and IoT concept Edge, Mobile & IoT Architectures where compute sits on devices or near users — sharing the constraints of intermittent connectivity, limited resources and clients you cannot upgrade.
Fleet Reconnection Storm Device Thundering Herd, Synchronised Reconnect, IoT Recovery Surge concept Device Telemetry at Scale A synchronised burst of devices re-establishing connections after any disruption, which is far more expensive than steady-state traffic and routinely turns a brief platform blip into a prolonged outage.
Hardware Backed Credential concept Device Identity A private key generated inside a secure element and unable to leave it, so device identity cannot be copied off the device.
Ingest Fan-In concept IoT Ingest Architecture The shape of a system receiving many small messages from very many senders, where connection count rather than data volume is the primary constraint.
Invalid-Clock Boot Epoch Boot, Clock-Zero Boot, Time-Before-Trust Problem concept Physical-World Failure Modes A device booting with no trustworthy notion of time, which makes certificate validity unverifiable and creates a dependency loop - correct time needs a trusted connection and a trusted connection needs correct time.
Message Overhead Budget concept Constrained Protocols The proportion of each transmission spent on protocol rather than payload, which on a metered or battery-powered link determines the running cost.
Mobile App Architecture concept Mobile App Architecture Client architecture where the release cycle is not yours, old versions persist indefinitely, and the network is unreliable.
Physical World Failure Mode concept Physical-World Failure Modes The failure classes that only exist once software controls or observes physical equipment, where the system cannot be restarted and the consequences are not confined to data.
Platform Lifecycle Constraint concept Mobile App Architecture The operating system's rules about when your process runs, which are not negotiable and invalidate most assumptions carried over from server code.
Push Token Decay Stale Registration Token, Push Target Rot concept Push & Background Work The steady accumulation of push targets that no longer reach a device - which inflates fan-out cost and makes delivery metrics describe a list rather than an audience.
Resync Horizon Tombstone Retention Window, Full Resync Threshold concept Sync & Conflict Resolution The age of the oldest change a server can still describe as a delta - beyond which a returning client must take a full snapshot or it will silently keep records that were deleted.
Sync Conflict Resolution concept Sync & Conflict Resolution The policy applied when the same record was changed on two devices while they were disconnected, and both changes now arrive.
Tombstone Accumulation Metadata Growth, CRDT Garbage Problem concept CRDTs The unbounded growth of deletion markers and causal metadata that a coordination-free replica must retain so a peer it has not yet seen cannot resurrect removed data.
Unreachable Node concept Edge, Mobile & IoT A component you cannot log into, restart or inspect, which removes every operational technique that assumes access to the running system.
Untrusted Client Timestamp Device Time Is Not Authoritative, Client Clock Assumption concept Mobile App Architecture The recognition that a timestamp set by a device is user-editable input rather than a fact - so reporting periods, ordering and de-duplication must not depend on it.
Update Long Tail Version Distribution Tail, Fleet Stratification concept OTA Updates The persistent stratum of devices running old firmware because they were offline during rollouts - which grows across releases and is measured by version distribution rather than by rollout percentage.