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
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.
Screen Shaped Endpoint	pattern	BFF for Experience	An endpoint that returns exactly what one screen needs in one request, shaped by the interface rather than by the domain model.
Screening Enforcement Point Sanctions Control Placement, Party Screening Gate	pattern	Geo-Restriction & Sanctions	The place in a system where a restriction is actually enforced - which must match what the obligation is about, since sanctions apply to parties and licensing restrictions apply to locations, and a control pla…
Segment-Isolated Serving Outlier Tenant Path, Heavy-User Isolation	pattern	Tail Latency	Giving a consistently slow population its own path - pool, precomputed view, or query strategy - rather than optimising the shared path to accommodate it.
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.
Semantic Layer Metrics Layer, Headless BI	pattern	Semantic Layer	A single governed definition of business metrics and entities, sitting between physical tables and every consuming tool.
Server-Driven UI Backend-Driven UI, Remote Screen Definition	pattern	Mobile Release Strategy	Describing screens as data returned by the server and rendered by native components - removing the app-store release from the change loop, in exchange for a permanent compatibility contract with every version …
Service Discovery	pattern	Service Discovery	How a caller finds a healthy instance of a callee in an environment where instances appear and disappear continuously.
Shadow Comparison	pattern	Parallel Run	Running a new implementation alongside the old on real traffic, comparing outputs without the new system affecting users.
Sharding Horizontal Partitioning	pattern	Data Architecture	Splitting one dataset across multiple independent databases by a partition key, so that each holds a disjoint subset.
Sharding in Practice Horizontal Partitioning	pattern	Partitioning & Sharding	Splitting data across independent stores, how to choose the key, and why resharding is the operation nobody plans for.
Sharding Patterns Horizontal Partitioning	pattern	Sharding Patterns	Splitting data across independent stores by a key, and the choice of that key — which is the decision that will define the system for years.
Shared Kernel Shared Model, Common Domain Library	pattern	Bounded Contexts	A deliberately shared subset of the domain model between two contexts, which removes translation cost by accepting a shared release cadence - the one context relationship that couples teams on purpose.
Shell Personalisation Cache the Shared, Personalise the Edge, Hole Punching	pattern	Rendering Strategies	Generating and caching the page that is identical for everyone, then applying per-user variation at the edge or on the client - preserving the cache hit rate that personalising the whole page destroys.
Shuffle Sharding Virtual Sharding, Randomised Subset Assignment	pattern	Bulkheads & Isolation	Assigning each tenant a random subset of the available capacity rather than a single shard, so that any two tenants rarely share their entire subset and one tenant's failure affects almost nobody completely.
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.
Signing Boundary Policy Policy at the HSM, Constrained Signing	pattern	Key Management	Enforcing transaction policy at the hardware signing boundary rather than in application code, so that a compromised application cannot obtain an arbitrary signature.
Slowly Changing Dimension SCD, Type 2 Dimension	pattern	Slowly Changing Dimensions	A modelling technique for handling attributes that change over time, where the choice determines whether historical reporting stays correct.
Snapshot-Stream Convergence Backfill Plus Change Stream, Initial Load Ordering	pattern	CDC Pipeline Design	Starting the change stream before taking the snapshot, so that changes occurring during the backfill are captured rather than silently lost.
Snapshotting	pattern	Event Sourcing	Periodically storing an aggregate's computed state so it can be loaded without replaying its entire event history.
Stable Event Identity Immutable Event ID, Delivery Deduplication Key	pattern	Webhooks	An event identifier that is identical across every delivery attempt of the same event - the single property that makes at-least-once delivery usable, and the one most often broken by regenerating the ID on retry.
Stale While Revalidate	pattern	Client Caching & Data Layer	Serving cached data immediately while fetching a fresh copy in the background, which makes an interface feel instant at the cost of a brief inconsistency.
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.
Store-and-Forward Queue On-Device Send Queue, Deferred Send Buffer	pattern	Mobile App Architecture	A durable queue on the device that accepts writes while the network is absent and drains them in order when it returns - with an explicit policy for what happens when it fills or an entry is rejected.
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	pattern	Strangler Fig	Replacing a legacy system incrementally by routing individual capabilities to new implementations until nothing is left running on the old 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.
Strangler Fig Execution	pattern	Strangler Fig	Incrementally replacing a legacy system by routing slices of functionality to new implementations behind a facade, until nothing routes to the original.
Stream Enrichment	pattern	Streaming Joins	Attaching reference data to a stream by lookup against a materialised table rather than by joining two unbounded streams.
Suppression List Do-Not-Reprocess List, Erasure Tombstone Registry	pattern	Data Subject Rights	A durable record of identifiers that must not be re-ingested, preventing an in-flight or replayed pipeline from recreating data that was just erased.
Sync Engine Local-First Sync, Client Database Replication, Delta Sync	pattern	Modular Monolith	A client-side database kept continuously in sync with the server through deltas, so every read and write is local and instantaneous - moving the network off the interaction critical path entirely.
Tag-Bound Access Policy Classification-Driven Access Control, Tag-Based Masking	pattern	Data Classification	An access rule attached to a classification label rather than to a table, so that tagging data is what applies the control and derived copies inherit it through lineage.
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.
Temporal Join As-Of Join, Point-in-Time Join	pattern	Streaming Joins	A join that enriches an event with the reference value as it was when the event occurred, rather than as it is now - which is the difference between a reproducible result and a drifting one.
Tenant Placement Hybrid Tenancy, Shared-to-Dedicated Migration	pattern	Partitioning & Sharding	Routing each tenant to a shared pool or a dedicated database according to its size and requirements, with an online migration path between them - the hybrid model that neither all-shared nor all-dedicated can match.
Tenant-Scoped Layout Key Tenant Clustering Key, Tenant-Aligned Physical Layout	pattern	Data Platform Tenancy	Making the tenant identifier the column that governs a table's physical organisation, so isolation, per-tenant cost attribution and per-tenant deletion come from layout rather than from access control alone.
Test Pyramid	pattern	Test Pyramid Shapes	The heuristic that a suite should hold many fast isolated tests, fewer integrated ones, and very few full end-to-end tests.
Test-Owned Data Data Created By The Test, Per-Test Tenancy	pattern	Test Data Management	Each test creating the exact data it needs through the product's own write path and disposing of it afterwards - replacing shared fixtures whose drift and coupling cause most cross-team test failures.
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.
Tiered Storage Remote Storage Offload, Long-Term Log Retention, Hot-Cold Log Tiering	pattern	Streaming Cost	Keeping recent log segments on broker local disk and older ones in object storage, which decouples retention from broker sizing and turns replay from an emergency measure into a routine design tool.
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.
Token Bucket	pattern	Rate Limiting	A rate-limiting algorithm holding a replenishing allowance of tokens, permitting controlled bursts while bounding the sustained rate.
Tokenisation	pattern	Tokenisation & Masking	Replacing a sensitive value with a meaningless surrogate, where the mapping back is held in a separate, tightly controlled vault.
Tolerant Reader	pattern	Backward Compatibility	A consumer that ignores fields it does not recognise and depends only on what it actually needs, so a producer can add to a contract without breaking it.
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.
Tool Result Budget Tool Output Capping, Result Truncation Contract	pattern	Tool Calling	A hard cap on the tokens any single tool may return into the model's context, with pagination and summarisation behind it, so that one unlucky query cannot fill the window and end the run.
Traffic Shadowing Dark Traffic, Mirroring, Shadow Testing	pattern	Parallel Run	Sending a copy of real production traffic to a new implementation while the existing one continues to serve users, comparing results without exposing anyone to the new system's mistakes.
Traffic Splitting	pattern	Service Mesh Networking	Directing a defined percentage or subset of requests to a different version of a service, configured at the routing layer rather than in application code.
Transactional Outbox Outbox Table, Reliable Event Publication, Store-and-Forward Events	pattern	Outbox	Writing an event into a table within the same transaction as the business change, then publishing it separately - so the event exists if and only if the change committed, which no ordering of two independent w…
Transactional Outbox Outbox Pattern	pattern	Outbox	Writing an event into the same database transaction as the state change, then relaying it, to eliminate the dual-write problem.
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.
Two-Stage Retrieval	pattern	Reranking	Retrieving a broad candidate set cheaply and then reordering it with an expensive, more accurate model.
Unbundled Event Store Disaggregated Telemetry Store, Object-Storage Column Store	pattern	Real-Time Analytical Stores	A telemetry store that separates writing, compaction and querying into independently scaled services over shared object storage and a metadata store, so retention cost stops being tied to the size of the query…
Value-Graduated Fallback Tiered Degradation by Stake, Risk-Weighted Fallback	pattern	Graceful Degradation	A degradation ladder whose depth depends on the value at stake, so a low-value transaction proceeds on weak signals while a high-value one fails closed - replacing a single binary decision that is always wrong…
Variant-Aware Purge Tag-Based Invalidation, Vary-Safe Purge	pattern	Edge Data Consistency	Invalidating every cached representation of a resource rather than one URL - because content negotiation and query parameters create many objects under one address, and a URL purge clears only one of them.
Version Transformation Layer Version Shim, Compatibility Transform, Request/Response Rewriting	pattern	API Versioning	Implementing an API once against its current shape and expressing every historical version as a pair of request and response transformations, so supporting an old version costs a small testable function rather…
Versioned Dataset Swap Atomic Pointer Flip, Generation Swap, Blue-Green Data	pattern	Data Architecture	Publishing a regenerated dataset as a complete new version alongside the live one and flipping a serving pointer atomically, so readers never observe a mixture of generations and rollback is a pointer flip rat…
Virtual Waiting Room Queue-It Pattern, On-Sale Queue, Demand Buffer	pattern	Business Continuity	A separately-hosted queue in front of a constrained system that admits users at a sustainable rate with a held place and honest status - converting an overload failure into a wait, and making allocation fairne…