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Terminology

2205 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 areas2205 Architecture Fundamentals77 Distributed Systems107 Data Architecture110 Cloud Architecture94 Networking88 API & Integration Architecture82 Reliability & Resilience75 Observability70 Performance & Capacity Engineering72 Security Architecture86 Cost Architecture & FinOps71 Business Architecture67 Architecture Communication67 Enterprise Architecture66 Legacy Modernization71 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 concept794 practice734 pattern368 metric125 case-study77 tool62 protocol45

734 terms shown.

Term Kind Topic What it is
Register of Information ICT Third-Party Register, Contractual Arrangements Register practice Sector Cloud Rules A maintained record of every contractual arrangement with a technology provider, including its subcontractors and which critical functions it supports, which converts supplier dependency from a question requir…
Rehost Lift and Shift practice Rehosting Moving a workload to new infrastructure with no change to the application — fastest, cheapest to execute, and the source of the bill that discredits migrations.
Rejected-Option Record ADR Alternatives Section, Why Not X practice Writing Decision Records The part of a decision record that captures what was considered and dismissed and on what grounds - the only content that code, diagrams and current-state documentation cannot carry.
Relational Modelling practice Relational Modelling Designing a schema around entities, relationships and enforced constraints — still the correct default for most transactional systems.
Replaceability Test Swap Test, Modularity Evidence practice Modularity The evidence-based check for whether a boundary is real - not how many services exist, but whether one implementation could be swapped without touching the others, and whether it ever has been.
Replatform practice Replatforming Moving a workload with targeted changes that capture most of the platform's benefit without redesigning the application.
Replay Effect Suppression Separating Computation From Effects, Safe Reprocessing practice Backfill & Reprocessing Separating a stream processor's computation from the components that act on its output, so that reprocessing a month of data does not re-send a month of notifications.
Replica Lag Routing Read Routing, Primary Pinning practice Replication Deciding, per read, whether it may be served by an asynchronous replica - the operational discipline that makes read scaling safe.
Report Migration Inventory practice Warehouse Migration The enumerated list of every report, extract and downstream consumer of the legacy warehouse, with usage evidence, which is what makes the migration finite.
Representative Device Measurement Measure Where Users Are, Field Distribution practice Real User Monitoring Measuring performance on the devices and networks the audience actually uses, and on the distribution rather than the median - because a build agent and a median user both represent nobody in particular.
Request Coalescing Request Collapsing, Single-Flight practice Caching Strategies Collapsing many concurrent requests for the same missing resource into a single upstream fetch, with the rest waiting on its result.
Requirements to Constraints practice Requirements to Constraints The translation step where a stated business wish becomes a number that rules designs out.
Research Skills practice Research & Evaluation Finding out what is true about a technology or a problem, efficiently and without being misled by marketing or by other people's context.
Reserved and Committed Capacity Savings Plan, Committed Use Discount practice Reserved & Committed Capacity Trading a commitment to spend for a substantial discount, where the risk is committing to an architecture you are about to change.
Residual Caller Tail Deprecation Long Tail, Last Caller Problem practice Platform API Deprecation The handful of callers left at the end of a deprecation who will not move on their own, and the mechanisms that clear them so the removal date holds instead of slipping.
Resilience Testing practice Resilience Testing Verifying that failure-handling behaves as designed — a category of testing distinct from functional and load testing, and usually absent.
Resource Modelling practice REST Design Expressing an API as nouns with a consistent hierarchy rather than as verbs, so URLs are predictable and methods carry the semantics.
Resource Saturation Audit practice Bottleneck Analysis A systematic checklist for locating resource bottlenecks by examining utilisation, saturation and errors for every resource in the system.
Restatement Record Correction Record, Submission Versioning practice Regulatory Reporting Pipelines Preserving the original submission alongside its correction, with the reason and the difference explicable - so that a restated figure strengthens the audit trail instead of destroying it.
Restore Drill practice Backup Strategies A scheduled, timed exercise of restoring from backup into a clean environment — the only thing that converts a backup from a hope into a control.
Restore Verification practice DR Testing Periodically performing a real restore from backup and validating the result, as the only evidence that a recovery capability exists.
Retention and Purge practice Retention & Purge Deleting data when its lawful or business purpose has ended, and being able to prove that it happened.
Retire-First Portfolio Bias Cheapest Sufficient Option, Retire and Retain Default practice The Six Rs Assigning every application the cheapest modernisation option that satisfies the business driver, with a written justification required for anything more - which resolves most portfolios into retire and retain…
Retrieval Evaluation practice LLM Evaluation Measuring whether the right context was retrieved, separately from whether the answer was good, because the two failures need different fixes.
Retrieval-Generation Separation Evaluate Retrieval Independently, Two-Stage Debugging practice RAG Architecture Measuring whether the correct passage was retrieved, separately from whether the answer was correct - the single diagnostic that turns unfalsifiable RAG debugging into a specific measurable defect.
Review Readiness Criteria practice Architecture Reviews A stated bar a design must meet before review, so the session is spent on judgement rather than on discovering that the work is not ready.
Review Scope Discipline practice Design Authority Stating what an architecture board does not review, which is what determines whether it stays useful or becomes a queue.
Revisit Condition Decision Expiry, Reconsider Trigger practice Writing Decision Records The stated, checkable circumstance under which an architectural decision should be reconsidered - the field that turns a historical record into a live decision.
Rightsizing practice Rightsizing Matching provisioned resources to measured need — the fastest large cost reduction available, and one that must respect headroom requirements.
Risk Assessment Methods practice Risk Assessment Methods Structured ways to identify and prioritise what could go wrong — where the value is the conversation and the ranking, not the number.
Roadmapping practice Architecture Roadmaps Sequencing architectural change so that each step delivers value and is safe to stop after — rather than planning a destination nobody reaches.
Rollup Policy Pre-Aggregation Policy, Retention Tiering practice Real-Time Analytical Stores The decision - made before ingestion, not after - about what granularity of data is retained for how long, and at what point raw events are collapsed into aggregates.
Route Origin Validation ROV, RPKI Origin Validation practice Routing & BGP Checking a BGP announcement's origin against a signed authorisation before accepting it, so a more specific prefix announced by the wrong network is dropped instead of winning.
Row Group Sizing Row Group Tuning, Parquet Block Size practice File Formats & Compaction Choosing how many rows a columnar file groups into one statistics-bearing unit, which sets both the finest granularity a query can skip and the memory a writer and reader need.
Rule of Three Abstract at the Third Instance, Duplicate Before Abstracting practice Evolutionary Architecture Hard-code the first case, copy for the second, abstract at the third - because only the third instance reveals which parts actually vary.
Runbook Playbook practice Observability A short, actionable document telling an on-call engineer what an alert means, what to check, and what the safe mitigations are.
Runbook Quality practice Incident Management The properties that make an operational procedure usable by a tired responder under pressure, as opposed to a document that merely exists.
Saga Compensation Design practice Saga Designing the undo actions for a distributed transaction, where compensation is a new business action rather than a rollback.
Scenario-Based Comparison Concrete Scenario Evaluation, Cash Out the Qualities practice Trade-off Analysis Methods Comparing design options against specific described situations rather than against abstract qualities - which forces vague terms to be cashed out and turns a discussion into a decision.
Scheduled Capacity Predictive Provisioning, Calendar-Driven Scaling practice Autoscaling Provisioning ahead of a known event rather than reacting to its traffic - the correct primary control for any spike whose rise time is shorter than an autoscaler's reaction time.
Scope Reduction practice PCI-DSS Scoping Shrinking the set of systems that store, process or transmit cardholder data, because the cost of the standard is proportional to the number of systems in scope.
Seam Identification practice Strangler Fig Locating the places in a legacy system where behaviour can be intercepted and redirected, which determines whether an incremental migration is feasible at all.
Seasonality-Aware Threshold Same-Weekday Baseline, Seasonal Band practice Data Quality Dimensions Setting a data quality alarm against the comparable period rather than the previous one, so that a business's own weekly and monthly rhythm does not generate alerts nobody can act on.
Secrets Management practice Security Architecture Storing, distributing, rotating and auditing credentials so that they never live in code, images or configuration files.
Secure API Design practice Secure API Design Building an interface where the safe path is the default and the unsafe one requires deliberate effort.
Security Design Review practice Security Design Review A structured examination of an architecture's security properties before it is built, focused on trust boundaries and threat paths rather than on a checklist.
Security Incident Response practice Security Incident Response Responding to a compromise — where the architecture determines whether you can detect it, contain it, and prove what happened.
Security Testing in the Pipeline Shift-Left Security, SAST/DAST/SCA practice Security Testing in the Pipeline Automated security analysis embedded in the build, chosen and tuned so that findings are actionable rather than overwhelming.
Self-Service Provisioning practice Self-Service Provisioning A developer obtaining infrastructure through an automated interface bound by policy, with no ticket and no human approval in the path.
Semantic Chunking practice Chunking & Retrieval Splitting documents along their meaning and structure rather than at fixed character counts, because retrieval quality is bounded by chunk quality.
Semantic Diffing of API Schemas practice Backward Compatibility Comparing the published contract between builds and failing the build on a breaking change, so compatibility is mechanical rather than remembered.
Semantic Versioning SemVer practice API Versioning A version scheme where the number itself states the compatibility promise — major for breaking, minor for additive, patch for fixes.
Sensitivity Analysis What-Would-Change-The-Answer Analysis practice Trade-off Analysis Methods Identifying which assumption, if wrong, would change the decision - which tells you what to measure early and what to design to change cheaply.
Sensitivity Labelling Data Classification Tagging practice Sensitivity Labelling Attaching a machine-readable classification to data at the column or asset level, so that downstream controls can be applied automatically.
Sensor Input Validation Telemetry Plausibility Checking, Physical Input Sanitisation practice Physical-World Failure Modes Treating readings from physical devices as untrusted input requiring plausibility checks - because a sensor that fails toward a well-formed wrong value is far more damaging than one that stops reporting.
Sequence Diagram practice Architecture Communication A diagram showing the ordered exchange of messages between participants over time, used to make an interaction's control flow and failure points explicit.
Sequence Diagrams practice Sequence Diagrams Showing the order of interactions over time — the only common diagram that makes latency, ordering and failure behaviour visible.
Service Boundary Heuristics practice Service Boundaries The signals that indicate where a service boundary belongs, and the ones that reliably mislead.
Service Maturity Scorecard Production Readiness Scorecard practice Platform Adoption An automated per-service assessment against the organisation's operational standards, visible to the owning team.
Severity Levels SEV Levels practice Reliability & Resilience A predefined scale of incident impact that determines who is woken, how fast, and what process applies.