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

18 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Bloom Filter Cache Guard	pattern	Caching Strategies	Placing a Bloom filter in front of an expensive lookup so that keys which certainly do not exist never reach it.
Change Data Capture CDC	pattern	Data Architecture	Publishing a stream of a database's row-level changes by reading its replication log, without modifying the application that owns it.
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.
Crypto-Shredding Cryptographic Erasure	pattern	Data Lifecycle & Retention	Encrypting each subject's data with its own key and destroying that key to render the data permanently unreadable, achieving deletion without deleting.
Database per Service	pattern	Polyglot Persistence	Each service owning its own datastore, with no other service reading or writing it directly.
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 Upcasting	pattern	Event Sourcing	Transforming an old event's stored form into the current shape as it is read, so historical events remain replayable after the schema changes.
Log-Based CDC	pattern	Change Data Capture	Capturing changes by reading the database's own write-ahead log, which sees every change with no load on the source and no application involvement.
Materialized View	pattern	Data Architecture	A precomputed, stored result of a query, refreshed on a schedule or from a change stream, read instead of recomputing.
Multi-Leader Replication Multi-Master, Active-Active Replication	pattern	Replication	Accepting writes at more than one node and replicating between them, which removes the single-primary bottleneck and introduces write conflicts.
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.
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.
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 Replica	pattern	Data Architecture	A copy of a database that receives changes from the primary and serves read-only queries, spreading read load.
Sharding Horizontal Partitioning	pattern	Data Architecture	Splitting one dataset across multiple independent databases by a partition key, so that each holds a disjoint subset.
Slowly Changing Dimension SCD	pattern	Data Warehousing	A strategy for handling attributes that change over time, deciding whether history is preserved and how facts attach to the correct version.
Snapshotting	pattern	Event Sourcing	Periodically storing an aggregate's computed state so it can be loaded without replaying its entire event history.
Star Schema	pattern	Data Warehousing	A dimensional model with one central fact table of measurements surrounded by denormalised dimension tables describing them.