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

7 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Byzantine Fault	concept	Failure Modes	A failure in which a component behaves arbitrarily or deceptively — returning wrong results rather than stopping — as distinct from simply crashing.
Circular Observability Dependency Blind Spot Cycle, Self-Observing Stack, Telemetry Co-Failure	concept	Failure Modes	When the tooling used to diagnose a failure runs on the infrastructure that is failing - so the outage removes the ability to see the outage, converting a technical problem into a search problem.
Control-Interval Matching Actuation Delay Matching, Feedback Loop Damping	concept	Failure Modes	Setting a feedback loop's control interval to the delay of the thing it actuates - because a controller that adjusts faster than the system can respond amplifies noise instead of correcting error.
Fail-Fast vs Fail-Safe	concept	Failure Modes	Whether a component should stop immediately on detecting a problem, or continue in a degraded but safe mode — a choice that depends entirely on which outcome is worse.
Gray Failure Partial Failure, Fail-Slow	concept	Failure Modes	A component that is degraded rather than down, passing health checks while serving a portion of requests slowly or incorrectly.
Grey Failure Partial Failure, Fail-Slow	concept	Failure Modes	A component that is degraded rather than down — slow, intermittently erroring, or failing for a subset of operations — which defeats health checks built for binary states.
Metastable Failure Congestive Collapse, Death Spiral	concept	Failure Modes	A failure state that sustains itself after the original trigger is gone, because the system's own recovery behaviour generates the load keeping it down.