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
Concurrency	concept	Performance & Capacity	The number of operations in progress at once — distinct from parallelism, which is how many are literally executing simultaneously.
Connection Pool	concept	Performance & Capacity	A fixed set of reusable database connections shared by an application's requests, and one of the most common hidden capacity ceilings.
Horizontal vs Vertical Scaling Scale Out vs Scale Up	concept	Performance & Capacity	Adding more machines versus making one machine bigger — and the fact that vertical is underrated for stateful tiers.
Little's Law	concept	Performance & Capacity	In a stable system, the average number of items in it equals the arrival rate times the average time each spends in it — L = λW.