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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

362 terms shown.

Term Kind Topic What it is
Client-Specific Aggregation pattern Backend for Frontend A dedicated backend per client type that shapes and combines downstream data for that client's needs, owned by the client team.
Comparative Canary Control-Group Canary, A/B Rollout Analysis, Baseline Comparison pattern Progressive Delivery Evaluating a canary against a simultaneously-running control group of the same size rather than against fixed thresholds, so environmental variation cancels out and genuine regressions are detectable at much s…
Compensating Transaction pattern Sagas & Compensation A business operation that semantically undoes a previously committed step — not a rollback, because the original effect was visible and may not be fully reversible.
Competing Consumers pattern Competing Consumers Multiple instances reading from the same queue, each taking different messages, so throughput scales by adding consumers.
Compliance Scope Reduction Scope Minimisation, Descoping pattern Certification Impact on Architecture Designing so that regulated data never touches most of the estate, which removes systems from assessment entirely rather than adding controls to them.
Computation-Only Collaboration pattern Data Sharing & Clean Rooms Two parties analysing their combined data without either receiving the other's records, by permitting only queries whose outputs are aggregate.
Concurrency Limiting pattern Fault Isolation Bounding the number of simultaneous in-flight operations so that overload produces fast rejection rather than resource exhaustion.
Configuration Surface Absorbing Variation by Configuration, Yes-Configured pattern Stakeholder Analysis A deliberately designed set of configurable behaviours that absorbs the customisation requests a business will predictably receive, so the answer becomes "yes, configured" rather than "yes, built".
Conflation Last-Value Caching, Superseding Updates pattern Backpressure & Flow Control Discarding superseded updates so that a slow consumer receives the latest state rather than a backlog of stale ones - bounding work by entity count instead of by message rate.
Conflict Copy Conflicted Version, Both-Sides Preservation pattern Sync & Conflict Resolution Preserving both sides of a sync conflict as separate artefacts rather than choosing a winner - the only resolution strategy that never loses user work.
Conformed Dimension Shared Dimension, Conformed Attribute pattern Dimensional Modelling A dimension defined once and used identically by every fact table, so that measures from different processes can be filtered and grouped together without a reconciliation argument.
Consent Architecture pattern Consent Architecture Capturing, storing and enforcing a person's permissions for specific processing purposes, across every system that acts on their data.
Consumer-Driven Contract CDC, Pact Testing pattern Consumer-Driven Contracts A machine-checkable expectation written by the consumer of an API and verified against the provider's build, catching integration breaks without a shared environment.
Content Pre-Positioning Proactive Fill, Push CDN, Predictive Caching pattern Content Delivery Networks Pushing predicted-demand content to edge caches during off-peak hours rather than fetching it on first request, converting an unpredictable peak-time origin fetch into a scheduled transfer when capacity is free.
Context Propagation pattern Correlation IDs Carrying request-scoped identifiers and metadata across every service, thread and asynchronous boundary so a single flow remains traceable end to end.
Contextual Retrieval Contextual Chunk Prefixing, Contextual Embeddings pattern Chunking & Retrieval Prepending a short generated description of where a chunk sits in its document before embedding it, so that a passage full of pronouns and bare figures still matches the query that should find it.
Correlation IDs Request ID, Trace ID pattern Correlation IDs A single identifier attached at the edge and carried through every hop, synchronous and asynchronous, that stitches an investigation together.
Cost-Weighted Rate Limiting Compute Units, Weighted Quotas pattern API Gateways Limiting callers by the resources their requests consume rather than by request count, because on any API where request cost varies by orders of magnitude, counting requests protects nothing.
CQRS Command Query Responsibility Segregation pattern CQRS Separating the model that accepts writes from the model that serves reads, so each can be optimised independently — at the cost of the gap between them.
CQRS Command Query Responsibility Segregation pattern Data Architecture Separating the model used to change state from the model used to read it, so each can be optimised independently.
CQRS as a Data Architecture pattern CQRS Treating the serving layer as a derived, rebuildable projection of an authoritative write store.
Crypto-Shredding Cryptographic Erasure, Key Destruction Deletion, Per-Subject Encryption pattern Data Lifecycle & Retention Encrypting each data subject's personal data under a key unique to them, so that a deletion request is satisfied by destroying the key rather than by rewriting immutable or widely-replicated data.
Cursor Opacity Opaque Continuation Token, Sealed Cursor pattern Pagination & Filtering Making a pagination cursor an untyped token the client cannot construct or interpret, so the server keeps the freedom to change what it encodes without breaking callers.
Data Clean Room pattern Data Sharing & Clean Rooms A controlled environment where two parties analyse their combined data without either gaining access to the other's raw records.
Data Contract Producer Contract, Schema Agreement, Published Interface pattern Data Contracts An explicit agreement between a data producer and its consumers covering schema, semantics, quality and change policy - which converts an implicit dependency on someone else's internal table into a managed int…
Data Contract pattern Data Contracts An explicit, versioned, enforceable agreement between a data producer and its consumers covering schema, semantics, quality and delivery.
Data Vault Modelling pattern Data Vault Modelling A modelling approach separating business keys, relationships and descriptive attributes into hubs, links and satellites, optimised for auditability and change absorption.
Data Virtualisation Query Federation, Logical Data Warehouse pattern Data Virtualisation Querying data where it lives across multiple systems through a single logical layer, without physically consolidating it.
Database per Service pattern Polyglot Persistence Each service owning its own datastore, with no other service reading or writing it directly.
Dead Letter Queue DLQ, Poison Message Queue pattern Dead Letter Handling A separate destination for messages that cannot be processed successfully, so one bad message does not halt the stream behind it.
Deadline Propagation Budget Propagation, Request Deadline, Remaining-Time Passing pattern Timeouts & Deadlines Carrying the originating request's absolute deadline through every downstream hop so that each service works with the remaining budget - and refuses work that cannot finish in time, rather than starting it.
Deadline Propagation Deadline Budget, Request Deadline pattern Timeouts & Deadlines Passing the remaining time budget down each call in a request chain so downstream services never work on a request whose caller has already given up.
Deemed Status Provisional Outcome, Presumed Result, Timeout Resolution Rule pattern Financial Services Regulation A provisional outcome assigned to a transaction whose true result is unknown after a timeout, resolved later by reconciliation - because a payments rail cannot leave money in an indeterminate state indefinitely.
Deletion Propagation Purge Fanout, Erasure Propagation pattern Retention & Purge The mechanism that carries a deletion from the primary store to every derived copy - which is where retention and erasure obligations are actually met or missed.
Denormalised Log Resolved-Asset Topic, Fat Event Stream pattern Kappa vs Lambda A second topic that republishes each record with its referenced data already resolved, so consumers read complete payloads instead of each performing the same joins against the normalised source of truth.
Deployment Pipeline CD Pipeline, Build Pipeline pattern Pipeline Architecture The automated path a commit travels from source to production, where every stage is a chance to reject the change and no stage can be skipped.
Destination Isolation Per-Destination Queues, Independent Fan-Out pattern Event-Driven Integration Fanning events out by writing to a queue per destination rather than delivering synchronously to many, so that one failing or slow destination cannot delay, block or duplicate delivery to the others.
Developer Environment on Demand Ephemeral Environment, Preview Environment pattern Developer Environments A full running instance of the system created automatically per branch or pull request and destroyed when it merges.
Device Shadow Digital Twin, Reported and Desired State pattern Digital Twin A cloud-side representation of a device's last reported state and its intended state, letting applications interact with devices that are asleep or offline.
Dimensional Model Star Schema, Kimball Model pattern Dimensional Modelling Organising analytical data as fact tables of measurements surrounded by dimension tables of descriptive context.
Distributed Locks in Practice Lease, Mutual Exclusion pattern Distributed Locking Why lease-based locking is unsafe without fencing, when locks are unavailable entirely, and the partitioning alternative that removes the problem.
Dual Write pattern Data Migration Strategies Writing the same change to both the old and new stores during a migration, and the reconciliation that makes it trustworthy.
Durable Execution Workflow-as-Code, Replay-Based Workflows, Persistent Execution pattern Saga Running workflow code whose complete execution history is persisted, so a crashed process resumes by replaying that history rather than restarting - which makes process failure an implementation detail rather …
Durable Execution Workflow Persistence, Resumable Orchestration pattern Reliability & Resilience Persisting a workflow's progress outside the process executing it, so that worker restarts, deployments and crashes resume from the last completed step rather than losing position.
Dynamic Secrets pattern Secrets Management Credentials generated on demand for a specific consumer with a short lease, rather than stored, shared and rotated periodically.
Edge Aggregation pattern Device Telemetry at Scale Summarising or filtering telemetry at the device or gateway so that only what is needed leaves, which is usually the difference between a viable and an unaffordable design.
Edge Personalisation pattern Edge Rendering Varying a cached response at the edge on a small number of attributes, so the page stays cacheable while still differing per visitor segment.
Edge Rendering Edge-Side Rendering, POP Rendering pattern Edge Rendering Producing a page's HTML in a lightweight runtime at a CDN point of presence rather than in a regional data centre - which removes network distance from the response and adds distance to the data.
Edge Triage On-Device Filtering, Selective Collection, Interesting-Event Upload pattern Fleet Management Deciding on the device which data is worth transmitting, because a fleet generates far more than any network can carry - and the common, uneventful case is also the least valuable.
Effective-Dated Rules Temporal Rule Versioning, As-At Governance pattern Regulatory Constraints Storing business and regulatory rules as versioned configuration with effective dates, so a record remains governed by the rules that applied when it was created - without which every rule change requires a da…
Enabling Team pattern Platform Team Topologies A team whose output is other teams' increased capability, working alongside them temporarily rather than owning a component permanently.
Entity Homing Home Region, Per-Entity Primary pattern Multi-Region Architecture Assigning each entity - customer, account, tenant - a single home region that owns its writes, so a regional outage affects a subset of entities rather than every write in the system.
Envelope Encryption pattern Key Management Encrypting data with a locally generated data key, then encrypting that key with a master key held in a key management service.
Ephemeral Environment pattern Developer Environments A full environment created on demand for one change and destroyed afterwards, which removes the queue for shared environments and the drift within them.
Error Fingerprinting Issue Grouping, Event Deduplication pattern Observability Deriving a stable identifier from an error's invariant attributes so that many occurrences collapse into one actionable issue - and the two directions in which the heuristic fails damagingly.
Event Sourcing pattern Data Architecture Storing the full sequence of state-changing events as the system of record, and deriving current state by replaying them.
Event Sourcing in Practice pattern Event Sourcing Storing state as an immutable sequence of events and deriving current state by replay — powerful where history is the domain, expensive everywhere else.
Event Sourcing in Practice Event Store, Append-Only State pattern Event Sourcing Storing the sequence of changes rather than current state, the capabilities that follow, and the erasure problem that must be designed for on day one.
Event Stream Versioning pattern Event Sourcing Transforming an old event version into the current shape when it is read, allowing a stored event history to be interpreted by evolved code.
Event Streaming Distributed Log, Commit Log pattern Event Streaming A durable ordered log of facts that many independent consumers read at their own pace, retaining events after consumption rather than deleting them.