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

10 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Autoscaling	pattern	Cloud Architecture	Adding and removing capacity automatically in response to a demand signal, to track load without paying for peak all the time.
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.
Immutable Backup Object Lock, WORM	pattern	Backup Strategies	A backup that cannot be modified or deleted for a defined retention period, even by an administrator — the control that makes backups survive ransomware and insider error.
Kubernetes Operator	pattern	Kubernetes	A custom controller that encodes operational knowledge for a specific application, reconciling a custom resource towards a desired state the same way built-in controllers do.
Landing Zone	pattern	Landing Zones	The pre-built, policy-governed cloud foundation into which workloads are deployed — account structure, networking, identity, logging and guardrails.
Multi-Region Active-Active	pattern	Multi-Region Architecture	Serving live traffic from two or more regions simultaneously, which removes failover time and introduces distributed data problems permanently.
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.
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.
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.
Warm Pool	pattern	Autoscaling	Pre-initialised instances held in a stopped or standby state so that scaling out skips boot and application warm-up.