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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
Shadow Planning Plan Shadowing, Shadow Query Planning, Dry-Run Routing practice Refactoring Running a new routing or planning layer over live production traffic without serving its results, so the work it cannot handle is enumerated from real usage rather than from reading code.
Shard Key Partition Key practice Partitioning & Sharding The attribute deciding which partition a row belongs to - the single most consequential and least reversible choice in a partitioned data architecture.
Shard Key Selection practice Sharding Patterns Choosing the attribute that determines a record's partition, which fixes the system's distribution, query patterns and future flexibility.
Shared-Cause Analysis What Is Shared, Redundancy Audit practice Redundancy Auditing a redundant design by asking what every replica has in common, because redundancy protects against independent failure and not against anything shared by all copies.
Shift-Left Security practice Security Testing in the Pipeline Moving security checks earlier so findings arrive while the author still has context, on the condition that the signal-to-noise ratio justifies it.
Showback practice Platform Funding Reporting each team's share of platform and infrastructure cost without actually charging it, to change behaviour without creating a market.
Showback and Chargeback practice Showback & Chargeback Showing teams their costs, or actually billing them — two different mechanisms with different incentive effects and different failure modes.
Side-Effect Isolation Synthetic Traffic Containment, Shadow Write Isolation, Test Traffic Tagging practice Testing in Production Ensuring that test, synthetic or shadowed traffic in production cannot produce real-world effects - the control that separates professional production testing from an incident caused deliberately.
Significance Trigger Review Trigger, Architecturally Significant Change practice Architecture Review Boards A pre-defined, published condition that requires architectural review - so that governance covers what matters and does not become a queue in front of everything else.
Significant-Minority Trigger Defined Escalation Criteria, When Humans Review practice Deployment Gates A stated rule defining which changes require human review, so the reservation of manual approval is a rule rather than a judgement made under time pressure.
Single-Credential Test Can One Credential Do Both, Segregation Reality Check practice Segregation of Duties Asking whether any single credential - including a database administrator, a root account or a deployment pipeline - can both initiate and approve a movement of value, which distinguishes a real segregation co…
Six Rs Decision Migration Disposition practice The Six Rs Classifying each application into rehost, replatform, refactor, repurchase, retire or retain, based on value and effort rather than on preference.
SLI Measurement Point SLI Vantage Point, Indicator Measurement Location practice SLO Monitoring The deliberate choice of where in the request path an indicator is computed, which determines which failures the objective can see at all.
Small Model Routing Model Cascade, Tiered Inference practice Model Selection Sending each request to the smallest model that can handle it, escalating to a larger one only when needed.
Snapshot Expiry Snapshot Retention, Metadata Expiry practice Open Table Formats The scheduled removal of a table's old snapshots and the data files only those snapshots referenced, which is what stops time travel from turning every rewritten row into permanent storage.
Soak Period Bake Time, Observation Window practice Multi-Region Rollout The deliberate waiting time between rollout stages, long enough to surface problems that do not appear immediately - and the first thing compressed under delivery pressure.
Soak Test practice Soak Testing Running sustained realistic load for hours or days to expose defects that accumulate over time rather than appearing under peak load.
Soak Testing practice Soak Testing Running at sustained realistic load for hours or days to find the failures that only appear with time.
Software Contract Tests practice Contract Tests Verifying an interaction between two components from both sides independently, so integration confidence does not require deploying both.
SOLID practice Software Architecture Five object-oriented design principles — single responsibility, open/closed, Liskov substitution, interface segregation, dependency inversion.
Source Triangulation practice Research & Evaluation Confirming a technical claim from several independent sources of differing type, because most available material is marketing or an unrepresentative anecdote.
Span Attribute Budget Trace Attribute Discipline, Span Cardinality Budget practice Distributed Tracing A deliberate limit on how many spans a request emits and how many attributes each carries, set so that traces stay readable and affordable rather than complete.
Spec-First Development Design-First practice API Documentation Writing and reviewing the API specification before implementing, so the contract is designed deliberately rather than emerging from code.
Spend Control Gate Funding Gate, Investment Approval Control practice Paved Roads Architecture governance applied at the point money is committed rather than at design review, so the conversation happens while the decision is still reversible and the centre has actual authority.
Spike and Prototype practice Deciding Under Uncertainty A time-boxed experiment run to reduce uncertainty about a specific question, producing evidence rather than a component.
Spike Budget Price of Information, Information Purchase Test practice Research & Evaluation The arithmetic that decides whether to buy evidence before committing - comparing the full cost of an investigation against the probability of choosing wrong multiplied by what correcting it later would cost.
Spot Capacity Preemptible, Interruptible Instances practice Spot & Interruptible Capacity Using a provider's spare capacity at a steep discount, in exchange for the provider being able to reclaim it at short notice.
Stacked Changes Stacked Diffs, Patch Series, Dependent Change Chain practice Branching Models Splitting one body of work into a chain of small dependent changes that each review and merge on their own, so branch lifetime is set by the size of a link rather than the size of the feature.
Stakeholder Analysis practice Stakeholder Analysis Identifying who has a stake in a decision, what each cares about, and what would make each object — before the design review rather than during it.
Standard Change practice Change Management vs CD A pre-authorised, low-risk, repeatable change type that may be executed without going through a change advisory board.
Standards Lifecycle practice Technology Standards Managing technology standards through explicit states with review dates, so the standard set reflects current reality rather than past decisions.
State Time-to-Live State TTL, State Expiry practice Stateful Stream Processing An expiry policy on stream-processor state so that state size tracks the active key set rather than the accumulated history of everything the job has ever seen.
Steward Accountability practice Data Stewardship Making stewardship a defined role with time, authority and consequences, rather than a title added to somebody's existing job.
Stewardship Escalation Path Data Decision Route, Definition Arbitration Path practice Data Stewardship The named route and time limit by which a disagreement a steward cannot settle reaches someone entitled to decide it, without which stewardship produces opinions rather than rulings.
Stop Authority Halt Right, Andon Authority practice Handling Disagreement A named role's pre-agreed right to halt a running system alone, without consensus on the cause, so that a loss accumulating per minute is stopped before it is understood.
Storage Lifecycle Policy practice Storage Costs Automated rules that move objects between storage classes as they age, matching cost to the declining probability that data will be read.
Storage Tiering Lifecycle Management, Hot-Warm-Cold Storage practice Cloud Storage Placing objects in storage classes according to access probability, so cost tracks usage rather than volume.
Strategic Sourcing Decision practice Build vs Buy A build-versus-buy decision framed around competitive differentiation and organisational capacity rather than a comparison of visible costs.
Streaming Schema Evolution practice Streaming Schema Evolution Changing the shape of events in a topic that has multiple independently deployed producers and consumers, plus retained history that still has to be readable.
Streaming vs Batch Decision practice Streaming vs Batch Choosing between continuous and periodic processing based on the decision latency the business actually requires, not on the appeal of real-time.
Stress Test practice Stress Testing Driving load beyond expected capacity to observe how the system behaves at and past its breaking point.
Stress Testing practice Stress Testing Deliberately exceeding capacity to find where the system breaks and — more importantly — how.
STRIDE practice Threat Modelling A mnemonic for six threat categories — spoofing, tampering, repudiation, information disclosure, denial of service, elevation of privilege — walked across each component and data flow.
Structural Cost Attribution Boundary-Based Allocation, Attribution Without Tagging practice Cost Allocation Deriving cost ownership from deployment boundaries - account per workload, cluster per team - rather than from tags, because tagging discipline never survives contact with a growing organisation.
Structured Logging practice Structured Logging Emitting logs as machine-parseable key-value records rather than formatted prose, so they can be queried, aggregated and correlated.
Sub-Capacity Licensing Virtualisation Capacity Licensing, Sub-Capacity Entitlement practice Licence & Vendor Costs The vendor programme that allows a per-core licence to be counted against the cores a workload is actually allowed to use, which is conditional on approved metering and reverts to the whole host when the meter…
Subject Access Fulfilment practice Data Subject Rights The operational path from a request to a complete, verified, delivered response within the statutory period, across systems that were never designed for it.
Subnet Sizing practice Subnetting Choosing subnet prefix lengths with enough headroom, given that subnets cannot be resized and cloud providers reserve several addresses in each.
Subnetting and Address Planning practice Subnetting Dividing address space across zones and tiers, and the exhaustion failures that appear only at container density.
Superseded-Work Cancellation Build Cancellation, Queue Deduplication practice Containers Cancelling queued work that a later submission has made irrelevant - usually the largest single capacity saving available during a burst, and almost free to implement.
Supply Chain Attestation SLSA, Provenance Attestation practice Supply Chain Security A signed statement about how an artifact was produced — from which source, by which builder, with which inputs — verified before deployment.
Survivorship Rules Golden Record Rules, Attribute Precedence practice Master Data Management Per-attribute rules deciding which source's value wins when several systems hold a different value for the same entity - the part of master data management that determines whether the golden record is trusted.
Sustainable On-Call practice On-Call An on-call arrangement whose alert volume, rotation size and compensation allow it to continue indefinitely without degrading the people in it.
Switching Egress Waiver Exit Transfer Credit, Egress Waiver on Exit practice Network & Egress Costs The provider programme that removes data-transfer-out charges for a customer leaving the platform, which deletes the headline number in most exit business cases and leaves engineering time and dual-running as …
Synthetic Monitoring practice Testing in Production Continuously executing a real user journey against production from outside it, so a broken journey is detected before a user reports it.
Systems Thinking practice Meta-Skills Reasoning about a system in terms of the interactions and feedback loops between its parts, rather than the parts individually.
Systems Thinking in Architecture practice Systems Thinking Reasoning about a system as a set of interacting feedback loops rather than as a collection of components, so that second-order effects are anticipated.
Table Maintenance Budget Maintenance Capacity Reservation, Housekeeping Window practice Workload Isolation Treating compaction, clustering and snapshot expiry as a workload class with its own reserved compute and a guaranteed window, rather than as low-priority work that loses to every deadline.
Tabletop Exercise practice Game Days A discussion-based walkthrough of a hypothetical incident that tests procedures and decision-making without touching any system.
Tagging Strategy practice Cloud Governance A defined, enforced set of metadata labels applied to every resource, without which cost allocation, ownership and lifecycle automation are all impossible.