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
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.
Latency	metric	Latency	How long one operation takes — a distribution, never a number, and dominated by its tail in any system with fan-out.
Little's Law in Practice	metric	Little's Law	L = λW — concurrency equals arrival rate times latency — and the reason a slowdown becomes an outage.
Overload Recovery Time Overload Settling Time	metric	Stress Testing	Wall-clock time from the moment load returns to normal until the system is fully healthy again, which is set by spare capacity rather than by service speed.
Percentile Latency	metric	Latency	Latency expressed as the value below which a given proportion of requests fall, used because averages conceal the behaviour that users notice.
Tail Latency p99, p999	metric	Performance & Capacity	The latency experienced by the slowest small percentage of requests, which is what users and dependent services actually feel.
Throughput	metric	Throughput	Work completed per unit time — bounded by the system's narrowest resource, and traded against latency.