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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

729 terms shown.

Term Kind Topic What it is
Abstraction Level Discipline practice C4 Model Keeping each diagram to a single level of zoom, and providing separate diagrams for each level rather than one diagram attempting all of them.
Access Pattern Driven Modelling practice SQL vs NoSQL Designing the data model from the queries the application must serve, rather than from an abstract normalised representation of the entities.
Accessibility Architecture Structural Accessibility, Accessibility by Construction practice Accessibility Architecture Placing conformance in the components routing and release pipeline that every team already uses - so accessibility is maintained by construction rather than recovered by an audit each year.
Accessibility Regression Gate Accessibility CI Gate, Conformance Gate practice Accessibility Architecture An automated check plus a named manual pass in the release pipeline that blocks a change which breaks accessibility, so conformance is maintained by the build rather than recovered by an annual audit.
Accessibility Testing a11y Testing, WCAG Testing practice Accessibility Testing Verifying that an interface is usable by people with disabilities, through automated checks, assistive technology testing and structural review.
Account Vending practice Landing Zones Automated creation of new cloud accounts pre-configured with the organisation's networking, identity, logging, guardrails and cost allocation.
Admission Control practice Load Shedding Deciding at the entrance whether to accept a request at all, based on whether the system can complete it within its deadline.
Adoption Barrier Diagnosis Why Teams Built Their Own, Duplication Root Cause practice Application Rationalisation Treating duplicated internal systems as evidence that the shared option was harder to adopt than to rebuild - and fixing that before consolidating, or the duplication returns.
ADR Lifecycle practice Decision Practice The states an architecture decision record moves through — proposed, accepted, superseded, deprecated — and the discipline that keeps the set trustworthy.
Adversarial Evaluation practice Model Evaluation & Red-Teaming Deliberately attempting to make a model behave badly, because a probabilistic system with no fixed expected output cannot be verified by conventional testing.
Advisory Review Model practice Architecture Review Boards Running architecture review as a consulting service that improves designs rather than as an approval gate that permits them.
AI Risk Tiering practice AI Risk Tiering Classifying AI systems by potential harm so that governance effort is proportionate, rather than applying the same controls to every use.
Amortised Cost View Effective Rate Reporting, Commitment-Adjusted Showback practice Cost Allocation Reporting each team's spend at the effective discounted rate spread across a commitment term, so a team's number moves only when its own usage moves rather than when the finance department buys something.
Analytics Cost Control practice Analytics Cost Control The set of design and operational choices that determine whether an elastic data platform costs a predictable amount or an alarming one.
Anomaly Retention Keep the Weird Records, Realistic Test Data practice Test Data Management Preserving the malformed, historical and hand-fixed records when producing test data - because they are precisely what breaks migrations and new code paths, and a sanitising process removes exactly what made t…
API Deprecation Policy practice APIs as Products The published commitment about how long a version is supported, how notice is given, and what consumers can expect — without which nothing is ever retired.
API Documentation practice API Documentation Documentation as part of the product surface — where quality determines adoption more than the API's technical design does.
API Error Design Problem Details, RFC 9457 practice API Error Handling Returning failures in a consistent machine-readable structure that tells a client what went wrong, whether to retry, and what to do about it.
API Product Management practice APIs as Products Treating an API as a product with a lifecycle — versioning, deprecation, adoption metrics and a support commitment — rather than as an implementation detail.
API Shapes for UI practice API Shapes for UI Designing APIs for what screens actually need — reducing round trips without coupling the backend to the interface.
API Versioning Strategy practice API Versioning The scheme for introducing incompatible change, and the far more important question of how long old versions live and who pays to migrate.
Application Decomposition practice Application Decomposition Breaking a large application into parts — where finding the seam matters more than the extraction technique.
Application Discovery practice Cloud Migration Establishing what applications exist, what they depend on, who owns them and whether anyone uses them — the step whose absence makes every later step a guess.
Application Portfolio Management practice Application Portfolio Management Managing the set of applications as an investment portfolio — deciding what to invest in, maintain, contain and retire.
Application Portfolio Management APM, Application Rationalisation practice Enterprise Architecture Maintaining an inventory of every application with its owner, cost, business value and technical health, and using it to decide what to invest in, replace or retire.
Application Portfolio Rationalisation APM, Portfolio Rationalisation practice Application Rationalisation Systematically assessing every application in the estate to decide what to keep, invest in, consolidate or retire.
Application Rationalisation practice Application Rationalisation Systematically reducing the number of applications in an estate by consolidating duplicates and retiring low-value systems.
Architectural Drivers practice Architectural Drivers The handful of requirements whose change would force the structure to change — the only ones worth designing against.
Architecturally Significant Requirement ASR practice Architectural Drivers The small subset of requirements whose change would force the structure to change - the only ones an architecture document owes an answer to.
Architecture Compliance Check practice Architecture Compliance Checks Automated verification that a running system still conforms to the architectural decisions and standards it was approved against.
Architecture Cost Model practice Cost & FinOps A calculation, made during design, of what an architecture will cost to run at expected and at peak volume.
Architecture Decision Log ADR Log, Decision Register practice Architecture Communication The ordered, immutable collection of a system's decision records, read as a history rather than as a specification.
Architecture Decision Record ADR practice Architecture Decision-Making A short, immutable document capturing one architectural decision, its context, the alternatives, and its consequences.
Architecture Decision Record Practice practice Decision Practice The habits that make decision records useful six months later — writing at decision time, recording rejected options, and never editing history.
Architecture Documentation practice Architecture Documentation Writing down the decisions and their reasoning at an altitude that stays true long enough to be worth reading.
Architecture Fitness Function in CI Architecture Test, ArchUnit Test practice Fitness Functions An executable check in the build that fails when an architectural constraint is violated, turning a design rule into a property the codebase cannot lose.
Architecture Fitness Test Dependency Rule Test, Architecture Unit Test, Boundary Enforcement practice Modular Monolith An automated check in the build that fails when code violates the intended module dependency rules - the mechanism that decides whether architectural boundaries survive schedule pressure or erode within months.
Architecture Principle practice Architecture Principles A durable agreed rule that rules options out, stated with rationale and implications rather than as a slogan.
Architecture Principle practice Architecture Fundamentals A durable, agreed rule that constrains design decisions in advance, stated with its rationale and its implications.
Architecture Review Board ARB, Design Authority practice Enterprise Architecture A forum that reviews significant designs against standards, risks and strategy before commitment.
Architecture Review Practice practice Architecture Reviews Running a design review that improves the design rather than performing gatekeeping, through timing, framing and the questions asked.
Architecture Roadmap practice Architecture Roadmaps A sequenced plan of architectural change expressed as capability outcomes and decision points rather than as a fixed timeline of projects.
Architecture Trade-off Analysis Method ATAM practice Architecture Decision-Making A structured evaluation that scores an architecture against prioritised quality-attribute scenarios and identifies the points where those attributes conflict.
Arrow Semantics Edge Semantics, Line Notation Discipline practice Architecture Diagrams The rule that every line on an architecture diagram declares what it is - call or data, synchronous or asynchronous, and what happens when it fails - because each meaning implies a different failure mode.
Artefact Promotion Build Once Deploy Many practice Artifact Management Moving the identical tested artefact between environments rather than rebuilding for each - so that what runs in production is what was tested.
Artifact Promotion practice Artifact Management Moving one immutable build between repositories as it earns trust, rather than rebuilding it for each environment.
Artifact Signing practice Supply Chain Security Cryptographically signing build outputs so that deployment can verify what is being run was produced by the expected pipeline from the expected source.
Aspirational and Achievable SLO practice SLI, SLO & SLA The distinction between the reliability a team wishes for and the reliability its current architecture and dependencies can actually deliver.
Assumption Excavation practice First-Principles Reasoning Deliberately surfacing the unstated beliefs behind a design or a requirement, to test which are constraints and which are merely habits.
Assumption Register practice Technical Constraints The record of the numeric assumptions a design was sized against, monitored so the architecture announces when its own premises expire.
Assurance Map practice Assurance, Audit & Model Risk A single view of which risks are covered by which assurance activity, exposing both the gaps nobody is looking at and the duplication several parties are paying for.
Attack-Path Framing Path-Based Finding, Attack-Path Finding Format practice Communicating Threat Models Writing each security finding as a reachable path from entry point to impact with the one change that removes it and the cost of that change, replacing severity scores that can be argued with instead of acted on.
Automated Governance practice Fitness Functions Encoding architectural rules as executable checks in the build pipeline, so conformance is verified continuously rather than reviewed periodically.
Automated Release Verification practice Deployment Gates A gate that compares the new version's live signals against the old one's and decides, on stated criteria, whether to continue or revert.
B2B Integration practice Partner & B2B Integration Integrating with partner organisations, where the technical problem is small and the versioning, onboarding and support problems are large.
Backfill practice Batch Orchestration Reprocessing historical periods through a pipeline after fixing a defect or adding a field, at a scale the pipeline was not sized for.
Backup Restore Testing practice Backup Strategies Periodically performing a full restore and measuring it, on the basis that an untested backup is a hypothesis rather than a capability.
Backup Strategy 3-2-1 Rule practice Cloud Architecture A plan for what is copied, how often, where to, how long it is kept, and — the part that decides whether it is real — how the restore is verified.
Benefit Realisation Checkpoint Post-Implementation Benefit Review, Benefit Sign-Off Gate practice Outcome Measurement A scheduled review after go-live at which the budget holder confirms whether the claimed benefit has appeared in a named line, so that a benefit which never arrives is distinguishable from one that did.
BI Governance practice BI Governance Keeping business intelligence trustworthy — through certified definitions and a semantic layer, without preventing analysts from working.