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

7 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
AI Gateway	pattern	AI-Era Architecture	A shared proxy in front of model providers that centralises routing, keys, quotas, caching, logging and safety policy.
Guardrail	pattern	AI-Era Architecture	A deterministic check applied to a model's input or output, enforcing rules that cannot be left to the model itself.
Human in the Loop HITL	pattern	AI-Era Architecture	Requiring human review or approval at a defined point in an automated flow, chosen by the reversibility and cost of the action.
Model Router	pattern	AI-Era Architecture	Directing each request to a model chosen by the task's difficulty, cost and latency budget, rather than sending everything to the largest model available.
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.
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.
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.