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

93 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Priority Queueing	pattern	Load Shedding	Classifying requests by business importance so that overload sheds the least valuable work first rather than an arbitrary slice.
Projection	pattern	CQRS	The process that consumes changes from the write side and maintains a read model, and the component where most CQRS bugs live.
Publish/Subscribe Pub/Sub	pattern	Architecture Patterns	A messaging pattern where each published message is delivered to every interested subscriber, rather than to one competing worker.
Query-Based CDC Polling CDC, Timestamp-Based CDC	pattern	Change Data Capture	Detecting changes by repeatedly querying for rows modified since the last run — simple, universally available, and lossy in specific ways.
Rate Limiting	pattern	API & Integration	Bounding how many requests a caller may make in a window, to protect capacity and enforce fair use.
Read Model Query Model, Projection Store	pattern	CQRS	A data structure shaped for a specific query rather than for the domain, maintained separately from the write model.
Read Replica	pattern	Data Architecture	A copy of a database that receives changes from the primary and serves read-only queries, spreading read load.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation RAG	pattern	AI-Era Architecture	Retrieving relevant documents at query time and putting them in the model's context, so answers are grounded in your data rather than in training data.
Retry Budget	pattern	Retries & Backoff	Capping retries as a proportion of overall traffic rather than as a count per request, so retries cannot multiply during the failure they are meant to survive.
Reverse Proxy	pattern	Networking	A server that receives client requests on behalf of one or more backends, forwarding them and returning the response.
Saga	pattern	Distributed Systems	A sequence of local transactions across services where each step has a compensating action that semantically undoes it if a later step fails.
Saga Orchestrator	pattern	Sagas & Compensation	A component that explicitly drives a saga's steps and compensations, holding the flow in one place rather than distributing it across event subscriptions.
Semantic Cache	pattern	AI-Era Architecture	Caching model responses keyed by the meaning of the request rather than by its exact text, so near-duplicate questions are served without a model call.
Sharding Horizontal Partitioning	pattern	Data Architecture	Splitting one dataset across multiple independent databases by a partition key, so that each holds a disjoint subset.
Shuffle Sharding	pattern	Distributed Systems	Assigning each customer a random combination of workers rather than a fixed shard, so that any two customers rarely share their whole set.
Sidecar	pattern	Architecture Patterns	Deploying a helper process alongside the main application in the same unit, to supply cross-cutting behaviour without changing the application.
Slowly Changing Dimension SCD	pattern	Data Warehousing	A strategy for handling attributes that change over time, deciding whether history is preserved and how facts attach to the correct version.
Snapshotting	pattern	Event Sourcing	Periodically storing an aggregate's computed state so it can be loaded without replaying its entire event history.
Star Schema	pattern	Data Warehousing	A dimensional model with one central fact table of measurements surrounded by denormalised dimension tables describing them.
Step-Up Authentication	pattern	Authentication	Requiring stronger proof of identity at the moment a consequential action is attempted, rather than applying maximum friction to every session.
Strangler Facade	pattern	Strangler Fig	The routing layer in front of a legacy system that decides, per capability, whether a request goes to the old implementation or the new one.
Strangler Fig Strangler Pattern	pattern	Architecture Patterns	Replacing a legacy system incrementally by routing individual capabilities to new implementations behind a facade, until nothing routes to the old system.
Tamper-Evident Log	pattern	Auditability	An audit log constructed so that any modification or deletion of past entries is detectable, typically by chaining entries cryptographically.
Target Tracking Scaling	pattern	Autoscaling	An autoscaling policy that adds or removes capacity to hold a chosen metric near a target value, like a thermostat, rather than reacting to threshold breaches.
Thread Pool Isolation	pattern	Bulkheads & Isolation	Giving each downstream dependency its own pool of threads or permits, so one slow dependency cannot consume the capacity needed to serve everything else.
Timeout Budget Deadline Propagation	pattern	Distributed Systems	Assigning a request an overall deadline at the edge and passing the remaining time down each hop, so no service works on something already out of time.
Tokenisation	pattern	Security Architecture	Replacing a sensitive value with a non-sensitive surrogate, with the mapping held in one tightly-controlled vault.
Tool Calling Function Calling	pattern	AI-Era Architecture	Giving a model a set of typed function definitions it can request to invoke, with the application executing the call and returning the result.
Try-Confirm-Cancel TCC, Reservation Pattern	pattern	Distributed Transactions	A three-phase distributed transaction where each participant first reserves resources, and a coordinator then confirms or cancels all reservations.
Warm Pool	pattern	Autoscaling	Pre-initialised instances held in a stopped or standby state so that scaling out skips boot and application warm-up.
Webhook	pattern	API & Integration	An HTTP callback from a provider to a consumer-supplied URL when an event occurs, replacing polling with push.
Workload Identity Service Identity, Federated Identity	pattern	Identity & Access Management	Giving a running workload a cryptographically verifiable identity issued by the platform, so it obtains short-lived credentials without a stored secret.
Zero-Downtime Migration Expand and Contract, Parallel Change	pattern	Legacy Modernization	Changing a schema or system while it stays in service, by adding the new alongside the old, migrating, then removing the old.