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
Webhook Reliability	practice	Webhooks	The delivery, retry, ordering, verification and replay concerns that separate a production webhook system from a fire-and-forget HTTP POST.
Webhook Signature	practice	Webhooks	An HMAC over the raw request body using a shared secret, letting a receiver verify a webhook genuinely came from the provider.
Weighted Decision Matrix	practice	Trade-off Analysis Methods	A scoring method that rates options against weighted criteria, used to expose disagreement about priorities rather than to produce an answer.
Weighted Shortest Job First	practice	Portfolio Prioritisation	Sequencing work by dividing the cost of delaying it by the effort to deliver it, which maximises value delivered per unit of time.
Well-Architected Review	practice	Cloud Architecture	A structured self-assessment of a workload against defined pillars — operational excellence, security, reliability, performance, cost, and sustainability.
Workload Fit Assessment	practice	Warehouse, Lake & Lakehouse	Choosing between warehouse, lake and lakehouse by the workloads that must run, rather than by which one is currently fashionable.
Workload Isolation	practice	Workload Isolation	Preventing one team's expensive query or backfill from degrading everyone else's analytics, by separating compute rather than sharing one pool.
Workload Model	practice	Load Testing	A description of the traffic mix, arrival pattern and data distribution a load test reproduces, which determines whether the test's results mean anything.
Write-Amplification Audit Index Cost Review, Write Path Accounting	practice	Query Optimisation	Accounting for everything a single logical write actually costs - indexes, replication, triggers, deletion of old rows - before concluding that a database needs more capacity.
Writing Decision Records ADR	practice	Writing Decision Records	Recording a decision so the next person understands why — including the options rejected and the conditions that would reverse it.
Written Communication	practice	Written Communication	Writing that reaches more people than any meeting, survives longer, and forces the thinking that verbal explanation lets you skip.
Written Design Document RFC, Design Doc	practice	Technical Proposals	A prose document proposing an approach, circulated for comment before implementation, which forces the clarity that diagrams and conversation allow you to avoid.
Zero-Downtime Cutover	practice	Zero-Downtime Migration	Moving a live system to a new implementation or datastore without an outage, using dual writes, backfill and a reversible traffic switch.
Zero-Downtime Deployment in Practice Rolling Deployment, Online Schema Change	practice	Zero-Downtime Migration	Shipping without a maintenance window, and the version-skew constraint that governs every schema and contract change.