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

3 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Alert Fatigue	concept	Observability	The desensitisation that follows from alerts that are frequent, non-actionable, or not tied to user impact — after which real alerts are missed too.
Cardinality	concept	Observability	The number of distinct time series produced by a metric, which is the product of the distinct values of all its labels — and the main driver of monitoring cost.
Observability	concept	Observability	The property of being able to answer new questions about a system's internal state from its external outputs, without shipping new code.