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Terminology

2205 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 areas2205 Architecture Fundamentals77 Distributed Systems107 Data Architecture110 Cloud Architecture94 Networking88 API & Integration Architecture82 Reliability & Resilience75 Observability70 Performance & Capacity Engineering72 Security Architecture86 Cost Architecture & FinOps71 Business Architecture67 Architecture Communication67 Enterprise Architecture66 Legacy Modernization71 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 concept794 practice734 pattern368 metric125 case-study77 tool62 protocol45

368 terms shown.

Term Kind Topic What it is
Output Validation Layer pattern Guardrails A deterministic check applied to model output before it is used, treating the model as an untrusted component.
Partial Hydration Islands Architecture, Selective Hydration pattern Hydration Cost Attaching client-side interactivity only to the components that need it, rather than reconstructing the whole page's component tree in the browser.
Paved Roads Golden Path pattern Paved Roads A supported, opinionated default path that is the easiest way to do the right thing — governance by convenience rather than by mandate.
Per-Dependency Concurrency Limit Dependency Semaphore, Downstream Bulkhead pattern Bulkheads & Isolation A hard cap on in-flight calls to a specific downstream, which bounds the damage a slow dependency can do regardless of how slow it becomes - more reliable than a circuit breaker because it needs no detection.
Per-Entity Migration State Record-Level Ownership Flag, Entity Migration Flag, Per-Row Routing State pattern Coexistence Patterns A field on each business entity naming the system currently authoritative for it, which makes the unit of migration one row rather than one capability - so traffic moves in nameable cohorts and rolls back by u…
Per-Record Tenancy Record-Level Ownership, Attribute-Based Tenancy, Cross-Org Data Ownership pattern Authorization Attaching the owning organisation to each record rather than to its container, so that data shared across tenant boundaries can still be governed, exported, retained and deleted according to the policy of whoe…
Persisted Query pattern GraphQL Registering allowed queries in advance and having clients send an identifier instead of the query text.
Phishing-Resistant Authentication Origin-Bound Authentication, Unphishable MFA pattern Authentication Authentication whose response cannot be replayed at a site other than the one it was produced for, because the authenticator signs the requesting origin rather than releasing a secret the user could pass on.
Pilot Light pattern Disaster Recovery A disaster recovery posture where core data is continuously replicated and minimal infrastructure runs, with the rest provisioned only on failover.
Pipeline Fan-Out pattern Pipeline Architecture Splitting independent verification work to run in parallel, bounded by what genuinely has no ordering dependency on anything else.
Pipes and Filters pattern Pipes and Filters Decomposing processing into independent stages connected by data channels, so each stage can be developed, tested, scaled and restarted alone.
Pipes and Filters pattern Architecture Patterns Decomposing processing into independent steps connected by channels, each transforming its input and passing it on.
Policy Decision Point PDP, Authorization Service, Policy Engine pattern Zero Trust The component that evaluates an authorisation question and returns a decision, kept separate from the enforcement points that ask, so policy can change without redeploying every service.
Port and Adapter pattern Hexagonal Architecture An interface defined by the application expressing what it needs, paired with an implementation that connects it to a specific technology.
Pre-Provisioned Capacity pattern Static Stability Running capacity that is already in place to absorb a failure, rather than depending on a control plane to create it during the failure.
Predicate-Based Filtering pattern Row & Column-Level Security A policy that appends a filter to every query on a table based on who is asking, so one physical table serves many audiences safely.
Primary-Key-Partitioned Upsert Upsert Partitioning Contract, Key-Routed Upsert pattern Real-Time Analytical Stores Routing every version of a record to one partition so a real-time store can resolve the latest value locally - which buys sub-second latest-value queries and fixes the partition count and key budget for the ta…
Priority Load Shedding Tiered Shedding, Criticality-Based Shedding, Selective Degradation pattern Load Shedding Dropping traffic by declared business criticality under stress rather than uniformly or randomly, exploiting the fact that the highest-volume requests are usually the least valuable ones.
Priority Queueing pattern Load Shedding Classifying requests by business importance so that overload sheds the least valuable work first rather than an arbitrary slice.
Process Manager pattern Orchestration vs Choreography A component that owns the state and sequencing of a multi-step business process, deciding what happens next in response to events.
Progressive Media Materialisation Lazy Transcoding, On-Demand Rendition pattern Content Delivery Networks Generating only a baseline media rendition on upload and producing higher-quality variants on first demand - trading a slower first view of unpopular content for a large reduction in transcoding and storage cost.
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 Publish/Subscribe One publication delivered to many subscribers, with the publisher unaware of who they are — and the fan-out problem that comes with it.
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.
Purpose-Based Access pattern Data Access Models Granting access for a stated and recorded purpose rather than by role alone, which is what several data protection regimes actually require.
Query Federation pattern Data Virtualisation Executing a single query across several underlying systems without moving the data, and the performance ceiling that pushdown determines.
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.
Rate Limiting in Practice Throttling, Quota Enforcement pattern Rate Limiting Bounding how much work one caller can demand, the algorithm choice that shows through to users, and why distributed enforcement is approximate.
Read Local Write Global pattern Edge Data Consistency Replicating read-only state to every edge location while directing writes to a single authoritative region, which is the arrangement most edge data stores actually provide.
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 Model Projection pattern CQRS A denormalised store built and maintained from write-side events specifically to serve one query shape efficiently.
Read Replica pattern Data Architecture A copy of a database that receives changes from the primary and serves read-only queries, spreading read load.
Read-First Extraction Reads Before Writes, Reversible Extraction Order pattern Strangler Fig Extracting a service's read path before its write path, because a wrong read migration is a flag flip while a wrong write migration is a data reconciliation exercise.
Real-Time Serving Layer pattern Real-Time Serving Layer The read path that answers queries in milliseconds from precomputed or continuously updated state — where the design question is what to compute when.
Reconciliation Loop pattern GitOps A controller that continuously compares declared state with actual state and acts to close the gap, replacing deployment as an event with convergence as a property.
Release Ring pattern Progressive Delivery An ordered cohort of users a change reaches before the next one, chosen so that early rings would notice a fault and tolerate it.
Release Strategies pattern Release Strategies How new code reaches users — rolling, blue-green, canary, or flag-controlled — chosen by rollback speed and blast radius.
Release Toggle Temporary Feature Flag, Rollout Flag, Deploy-Release Decoupler pattern Feature Flags A short-lived flag that decouples deploying code from releasing a feature, intended to be removed within weeks - and the category responsible for almost all accumulated feature-flag debt when it is not.
Release Train pattern Deployment Strategies A fixed-cadence release where whatever is ready by the departure time ships, and whatever is not waits for the next one.
Relocate Disposition Seventh R, Hypervisor-Level Migration, Cluster Relocation pattern The Six Rs The migration treatment that moves a hypervisor-managed estate to a hypervisor-compatible target with the application and operating system unchanged, so the unit of work is the cluster rather than the machine …
Remote Module Loading pattern Module Federation Importing code from another application's build at runtime, with the versioning, availability and failure questions that a normal import does not have.
Replay Pipeline pattern Kappa vs Lambda A single processing path that produces both live and historical results by re-running the same code over retained input, replacing the two-path Lambda arrangement.
Replication in Practice Read Replicas, Multi-Primary pattern Replication Copying data across nodes for availability and read capacity, and the lag that turns into user-visible bugs if session guarantees are not designed in.
Reported Versus Desired State pattern Digital Twin Holding two representations of a device — what it last said it was, and what it should be — with the gap between them driving reconciliation.
Request-Scoped Identity Principal-Bound Response, Per-Request Ownership Check pattern Secure API Design Binding every piece of shared mutable state a response is assembled from to the principal who asked for it, so that a bug in pooling or caching produces an error rather than another customer's data.
Reranking Cross-Encoder Reranking pattern Reranking Retrieving a wide candidate set cheaply, then reordering it with a more expensive model that scores each candidate against the query directly.
Reservation Ledger Stock Ledger, Reserve-Then-Commit pattern Transactions & Isolation Modelling stock as an append-only sequence of reservations, releases and allocations rather than as a mutable count - so the number has a history, can be reconciled, and does not become a single point of contention.
Retrieval Pipeline Stages pattern RAG Architecture The stages that turn a user question into grounded context — query processing, retrieval, reranking and assembly — each independently tunable.
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 Retry Ratio Limit, Adaptive Retry Throttling pattern Retries & Backoff A global cap on retries as a proportion of total requests, which bounds retry amplification during broad failures in a way that per-request retry counts cannot.
Reverse ETL Operational Analytics, Data Activation pattern Reverse ETL Pushing modelled data from the warehouse back into operational systems so that business tools act on the same definitions analysts report on.
Reverse Proxy pattern Networking A server that receives client requests on behalf of one or more backends, forwarding them and returning the response.
Reverse Proxy in Practice pattern Reverse Proxies A server that sits in front of origins and terminates, caches, routes and protects — the cheapest place to solve several problems at once.
Reverse Replication Cutover Backflow Replication, Bidirectional Cutover Window, Rollback Stream pattern Coexistence Patterns Keeping a replication stream flowing from the new store back to the old one after writes have moved, so that rolling back stays a routing change instead of a restore from backup.
Revocation Path Fast-Propagation Channel, Fail-Closed Config pattern Cloud Governance A separate, short-TTL, fail-closed channel for security-critical configuration changes, coexisting with an eventually-consistent cached channel for ordinary configuration.
Row-Level Security RLS, Fine-Grained Access Control pattern Row & Column-Level Security Access control enforced by the data platform on which rows a given principal can see, rather than by each application or query.
Runtime Composition pattern Micro-Frontends Assembling one page from independently deployed fragments at request or render time, which is what makes micro-frontends more than separate builds.
Saga Compensating Transaction, Long-Running Transaction pattern Distributed Transactions A sequence of local transactions across services where failure is handled by compensating actions rather than by rollback.
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.