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
Cost Per Transaction	metric	Performance vs Cost	Infrastructure cost divided by business volume, which reveals efficiency trends that absolute spend conceals.
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metric	Architecture Decision Records	The observed time it takes for half a set of architecture decision records to be superseded, read as a diagnosis of how the records are written rather than of how unstable the system is.
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…
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.
Latency Revenue Elasticity	metric	Performance vs Cost	The measured change in a business outcome per unit of added or removed latency, which turns "faster is better" into an amount of money and tells you when to stop buying milliseconds.
Utilisation Break-Even Break-Even Utilisation, Execution Model Crossover	metric	Serverless vs Containers	The sustained busy fraction at which always-on compute becomes cheaper than per-invocation billing, which turns the serverless-or-containers argument into arithmetic instead of preference.