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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

125 terms shown.

Term Kind Topic What it is
Adoption Curve metric Platform Adoption The proportion of teams actually using a platform capability over time, which is the only honest measure of whether the platform is working.
Afferent and Efferent Coupling metric Coupling The counts of components depending on a module and of components it depends upon, used together to identify which parts of a system are expensive to change.
Alert Actionability metric Alert Fatigue The proportion of alerts that result in a human taking action, used as the primary quality measure of an alerting system.
Approval Wait Queue Time in Lead Time, Waiting Not Working metric Flow Metrics The portion of lead time spent waiting for a human rather than for a machine - frequently the largest single component and invisible inside the aggregate because nobody measures it separately.
Architect Coverage Ratio Architect to Team Ratio, Gatekeeper Ratio metric Architecture Roles Teams served per architect before the role turns into a review queue, used to decide whether to hire reviewers or to remove the need for review.
Automated Accessibility Coverage metric Accessibility Testing The proportion of accessibility criteria a tool can decide mechanically — around a third — and the explicit acknowledgement that the rest needs people.
Backhaul Cost per Device-Day Bytes per Device-Day, Per-Device Data Budget metric Constrained Protocols The bytes a single device sends and receives in a day multiplied by the price of the link - the figure that converts a sampling decision into a line in the connectivity contract.
Base Image Currency metric Container Image Strategy How far behind the fleet's running images are from their patched base, which is the number that decides how fast a critical vulnerability can be closed.
Bin-Packing Efficiency Packing Density, Requested-to-Allocatable Ratio metric Rightsizing The share of purchased node capacity that scheduled workloads have actually reserved, which is the missing link between a rightsizing campaign and the invoice it was supposed to reduce.
Boundary-Crossing Count Teams Per Feature, Coordination Metric metric EA Metrics The number of teams that must change to deliver a median feature - the most revealing and least used architecture metric, because it measures whether boundaries match the way work arrives.
Branch Lifetime metric Trunk-Based Development How long a branch lives before being merged, which determines integration pain and is the practical measure of whether integration is continuous.
Break-Glass Change Ratio Emergency Change Rate, Bypass Ratio metric Change Advisory vs Automated Gates The share of production changes that took the emergency path instead of the gated one, which measures how much of the change population a control actually covers.
Business KPIs metric Business KPIs The measures the business runs on — which architects should understand, influence and instrument.
Business Metrics metric Business Metrics Measuring what the system exists to do — frequently the fastest and most reliable outage detector available.
Candidate Recall Ceiling First-Stage Recall, Retrieval Ceiling metric Reranking The share of queries whose correct passage appears anywhere in the first-stage candidate set - the hard upper bound on every later stage, since reranking reorders what was retrieved and cannot add to it.
Captive User Signal Mandated Tool Measurement, Workaround Count metric Product Thinking The small set of measurements that still carry information when users cannot choose an alternative - workarounds, time to first success, abandonment - because usage and satisfaction no longer do.
Change Failure Rate metric Quality Gates The proportion of deployments to production that cause a degradation requiring remediation.
Change Volume Ratio Update-to-Insert Ratio, Mutation Rate metric CDC Pipeline Design The proportion of a change stream that is updates and deletes rather than inserts, which decides target storage design, merge cost and whether a table can be append-only.
Chaos Experiment Yield Findings per Engineer-Week, Resilience Discovery Rate metric Chaos as a Test New findings per unit of resilience-engineering effort - the number that separates a chaos programme's decaying discovery value from its cheap and permanent regression value, and decides which half to fund.
Checkpoint Interval metric Stream Processing Frameworks How often a stateful processor persists its state and offsets, which trades steady-state overhead against how much work is redone after a failure.
Commitment Coverage metric Reserved & Committed Capacity The proportion of steady-state usage covered by discounted commitments, balanced against the risk of committing to capacity that is no longer needed.
Completeness SLO Did Everything Arrive, Delivery Completeness metric Streaming SLOs The proportion of produced events that actually reached the destination - the streaming SLO that is measured least often and whose absence conceals the most damaging failure.
Consumer Lag metric Streaming SLOs The gap between the latest offset written to a partition and the offset a consumer group has processed, expressed in records or in time.
Contract Coverage Gap Contract Blind Spot, Unasserted Field Surface metric Consumer-Driven Contracts The share of a provider's response that a consumer's code reads but its contract never asserts on - the exact surface a provider can delete while every contract check stays green.
Core Web Vitals metric Core Web Vitals A small set of user-centred performance metrics covering loading, interactivity and visual stability, measured on real users rather than in a lab.
Cost of Downtime metric Cost vs Reliability The quantified business impact of unavailability per unit of time, which converts reliability investment from an argument into an arithmetic comparison.
Cost per Request metric Cost per Request Total cost divided by units of business value — the metric that makes cost comparable across time, scale and design options.
Cost per Request metric Cost & FinOps The fully-loaded infrastructure cost of serving one request, and the unit that makes architectural cost decisions comparable.
Cost Per Transaction metric Performance vs Cost Infrastructure cost divided by business volume, which reveals efficiency trends that absolute spend conceals.
Cumulative Layout Shift metric Core Web Vitals The extent to which visible content moves unexpectedly during load, which correlates with mis-taps and is almost entirely preventable by reserving space.
Data Pipeline SLA Freshness SLA, Data SLO metric Data Platform Architecture A published commitment about when data will be available and how fresh it will be, turning a pipeline into something consumers can design against.
Dead-Letter Budget Diversion Budget, Poison Rate Budget metric Dead Letter Handling A declared ceiling on the share and the age of records a pipeline may divert before it counts as failing rather than coping - with an owner and a defined action attached to each breach.
Decision Half-Life metric Architecture Decision Records The observed time it takes for half a set of architecture decision records to be superseded, read as a diagnosis of how the records are written rather than of how unstable the system is.
Decision Latency Time to Architectural Decision, Decision Queue Time metric Organisational Constraints The elapsed time from a design question being raised to a decision being made, whose length changes not only when designs ship but how complicated they are - because optionality is the rational hedge against s…
Deletion Horizon Erasure Horizon, Last-Copy Latency metric Data Subject Rights The elapsed time after an erasure request until the last copy of the record is gone or unreadable, set by the longest-lived derived copy rather than by the live database.
DORA Metrics metric DORA Metrics Four measures of software delivery — deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, time to restore — that resist gaming better than most.
Dwell Time Mean Time to Detect metric Security Incident Response The period between an attacker gaining access and being detected — the metric that determines how much damage an intrusion can do.
EA Metrics metric EA Metrics Measuring whether an architecture practice is producing value — where output metrics mislead and outcome metrics are harder but real.
EA Value Metrics metric EA Metrics Measures that demonstrate what an enterprise architecture function has changed, chosen to avoid rewarding documentation volume.
Error Budget metric Reliability & Resilience The amount of unreliability an SLO permits, treated as a resource that feature velocity spends.
Evaluation Gate Coverage Gate Scope Ratio, Release Evaluation Coverage metric Model Evaluation & Red-Teaming The share of a feature's real failure surface that its release evaluation actually exercises, which determines whether a passed gate is evidence of safety or evidence that the suite is stale.
Exception Path Frequency Normal Exceptions, Physical Divergence Rate metric Physical-World Failure Modes The rate at which physical operations diverge from the system's model - a business metric to be managed rather than a defect rate to be eliminated, and the input to how the exception path should be resourced.
Exit Cost Switching Cost, Cost of Exit metric Build vs Buy The engineering effort and elapsed time required to move off a vendor, which sets both the real price of lock-in and the team's negotiating position at renewal.
Extraction Payback Period metric Monolith vs Microservices The time it takes for the coordination cost a service extraction removes to repay the one-off extraction cost plus the permanent cost of running one more deployable - which is usually never unless the module h…
Failover Propagation Delay Client Convergence Time, Failover Tail metric Failover The interval between a failover completing on the server side and the last client actually using the new location, which is usually the larger part of the recovery time users experience.
False-Decline Cost Cost of the False Positive, Friction Loss metric Security vs Usability The value lost to legitimate customers rejected or deterred by a control - invisible in fraud metrics, frequently larger than the losses prevented, and the number that turns a values argument into arithmetic.
Feature Freshness metric Feature Freshness How recent the data behind a model's input features is at the moment of inference, and the training-serving consistency problem it creates.
Feature Staleness metric Feature Freshness The age of the feature values a model scores against, and the divergence between how they are computed at training time and at inference time.
Flag Propagation Time Flag Convergence Time, Kill Switch Latency metric Client Feature Flags The worst-case delay between changing a feature flag and every client acting on the new value - the number that determines whether a flag can be used as a safety control or only as a release convenience.
Funnel-Stage Cost Ratio Attempts per Conversion Cost, Pre-Conversion Cost Multiple metric Unit Economics The cost incurred by all the attempts that precede one revenue event, expressed per revenue event, which exposes the case where making each attempt cheaper makes the business more expensive.
Glossary Term Half-Life Definition Decay Rate, Term Attestation Age metric Business Glossary The time after which half a glossary's definitions no longer match the SQL that implements them, measured by sampling rather than assumed, and used to set the review budget a glossary can actually afford.
Golden Path Adoption metric Paved Roads The proportion of teams voluntarily using the supported path, which is the honest measure of whether a platform is solving real problems.
Golden Signals metric Observability The four measurements that cover most of what matters for a request-driven service: latency, traffic, errors and saturation.
Goodput Useful Throughput metric Throughput The rate of completed work that someone is still waiting for, which diverges from throughput under overload and is the only rate that tracks what users receive.
Index Selectivity metric Indexing The fraction of rows a predicate eliminates — the property that determines whether an index is worth using at all.
Inference Cost per Interaction metric AI Cost Management The fully loaded token cost of one user interaction, including retrieval, retries, guardrails and agent loops, measured rather than estimated.
Inner Loop Latency metric Inner Loop & Outer Loop The time from changing a line to observing its effect, repeated dozens of times a day and therefore the highest-leverage number in developer experience.
Integration Change Amplification Counterparty Fan-Out, Schema Change Blast Radius metric Enterprise Integration The number of independently owned systems that must change when one system revises its interface - the measure that decides whether an integration estate is expensive to change, and the one that a hub is meant…
Integration Frequency metric Continuous Integration Discipline How often each engineer merges to the mainline — the measurement that distinguishes continuous integration from having a CI server.
Integration Throughput Ceiling Merge Queue Capacity, Serial Merge Limit metric Continuous Integration Discipline The maximum merges per day a verification pipeline can admit, set by run duration and merge concurrency, which caps how many engineers can integrate continuously before behaviour changes.