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

23 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Admission Control	pattern	Load Shedding	Deciding at the edge whether to accept a request at all, based on current capacity, before any work is done on it.
Bounded Queue	pattern	Backpressure & Flow Control	A queue with a maximum depth, which converts unbounded latency growth into an explicit rejection you can control.
Brownout	pattern	Load Shedding	Deliberately reducing the quality or completeness of every response under load, rather than serving some requests fully and rejecting others.
Bulkhead	pattern	Distributed Systems	Partitioning resources so that exhaustion caused by one dependency or tenant cannot starve the others.
Cell Isolation	pattern	Bulkheads & Isolation	Bulkheading at the level of a complete system copy, so that any failure — including ones nobody predicted — is contained to the customers assigned to one cell.
Circuit Breaker	pattern	Distributed Systems	A proxy that stops calling a failing dependency after a failure threshold, failing fast instead, and periodically tests whether it has recovered.
Client-Side Discovery	pattern	Service Discovery	The caller queries the registry itself and chooses an instance, rather than sending to a stable address that something else resolves.
Compensating Transaction	pattern	Sagas & Compensation	A business operation that semantically undoes a previously committed step — not a rollback, because the original effect was visible and may not be fully reversible.
Exponential Backoff	pattern	Distributed Systems	Increasing the wait between retries geometrically, with random jitter, so that failures do not synchronise into a stampede.
Fallback Strategy	pattern	Circuit Breakers	What a caller does instead when a circuit breaker is open — the part of the pattern that determines whether failing fast helps anyone.
Fencing Token	pattern	Leader Election	A monotonically increasing number issued with leadership or a lock, checked by the resource, so writes from a deposed holder are rejected.
Idempotency Token Store	pattern	Idempotency	The durable record of which idempotency keys have been seen and what each one returned, and the component that decides whether the guarantee is real.
Leader Election	pattern	Distributed Systems	The process by which a group of nodes agrees which one of them is currently in charge of a task that must not run twice.
Load Shedding	pattern	Distributed Systems	Deliberately rejecting a portion of incoming work during overload so that the remainder can be served correctly.
Optimistic Concurrency Control OCC, Compare-and-Set	pattern	Distributed Locking	Allowing concurrent work without locks and detecting conflict at write time by checking that the underlying version has not changed.
Priority Queueing	pattern	Load Shedding	Classifying requests by business importance so that overload sheds the least valuable work first rather than an arbitrary slice.
Retry Budget	pattern	Retries & Backoff	Capping retries as a proportion of overall traffic rather than as a count per request, so retries cannot multiply during the failure they are meant to survive.
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.
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.
Shuffle Sharding	pattern	Distributed Systems	Assigning each customer a random combination of workers rather than a fixed shard, so that any two customers rarely share their whole set.
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.
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.
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.