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

107 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Migration Wave	practice	Cloud Migration	A batch of applications migrated together, sequenced so that dependencies move in a workable order and each wave delivers learning for the next.
Multi-Factor Authentication MFA, 2FA	practice	Authentication	Requiring evidence from more than one category — something you know, have, or are — so a single stolen credential is insufficient.
Negotiation	practice	Architecture Communication	Reaching an agreement that both sides own, by trading on interests rather than arguing positions.
Normalisation Normal Forms	practice	Relational Modelling	Organising a schema so each fact is stored exactly once, removing the update anomalies that duplication creates.
OWASP Top Ten	practice	Security Architecture	A periodically updated consensus list of the most critical web application security risks, useful as a design-review checklist.
Parallel Run	practice	Legacy Modernization	Running the old and new systems side by side on the same inputs and comparing outputs, before the new one is trusted.
Pattern Recognition	practice	Meta-Skills	Recognising that a novel-looking problem is an instance of one you have seen before, and knowing which parts of the previous solution transfer.
Paved Road Golden Path	practice	Enterprise Architecture	A supported, opinionated default way to build and run a service, made easy enough that teams choose it rather than being required to.
Pipeline Orchestration	practice	ETL & ELT	Coordinating the execution of data tasks by dependency rather than by clock, with retries, backfill and observability built in.
Policy as Code	practice	Cloud Governance	Expressing governance rules as executable code evaluated automatically, so compliance is prevented at creation rather than reported after the fact.
Pragmatism	practice	Meta-Skills	Preferring the simplest architecture that satisfies the requirements, and treating additional structure as a cost that must be justified.
Presenting to Engineers	practice	Architecture Communication	Presenting a design at the level of mechanism, including the alternatives rejected and the parts you are still unsure about.
Presenting to Executives	practice	Architecture Communication	Leading with the decision and the business consequence, at a level of abstraction where technology names do not appear.
Privacy by Design	practice	Security Architecture	Building privacy protections into a system's structure from the start, rather than adding controls to a design that already collects and keeps everything.
Product Thinking	practice	Business Architecture	Treating what you build as something with users, a value proposition and a lifecycle, rather than as a project that completes.
Prompt Versioning	practice	AI-Era Architecture	Treating prompts as versioned, reviewed, tested artefacts rather than as strings edited in place.
Quality Attribute Scenario QAS	practice	Architecture Fundamentals	A structured, testable statement of a non-functional requirement: source, stimulus, environment, artefact, response, response measure.
RED Method	practice	Observability	A minimal per-service dashboard: Rate, Errors, Duration — the request-centric view of whether users are being served.
Refactoring	practice	Software Architecture	Changing the internal structure of code without changing its external behaviour, in small verified steps.
Reference Architecture	practice	Enterprise Architecture	A pre-approved, documented template for a recurring class of solution, so that similar problems do not get individually redesigned.
Regional Evacuation Region Failover Drill	practice	Multi-Region Architecture	The deliberate, rehearsed act of shifting all traffic out of a region — treated as a routine operation rather than an emergency procedure.
Replatform Lift and Reshape	practice	Legacy Modernization	Migrating an application largely as-is while making targeted changes to exploit the target platform — usually the best return per unit of effort.
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.
Rightsizing	practice	Cost & FinOps	Matching provisioned resources to observed demand, rather than to the guess made when they were created.
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.
Secrets Management	practice	Security Architecture	Storing, distributing, rotating and auditing credentials so that they never live in code, images or configuration files.
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.
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.
Severity Levels SEV Levels	practice	Reliability & Resilience	A predefined scale of incident impact that determines who is woken, how fast, and what process applies.
SOLID	practice	Software Architecture	Five object-oriented design principles — single responsibility, open/closed, Liskov substitution, interface segregation, dependency inversion.
Stakeholder Analysis	practice	Business Architecture	Identifying who is affected by an architecture, what each of them needs from it, and how much influence they have over whether it proceeds.
Storage Tiering	practice	Cost & FinOps	Moving data between access tiers as it cools, so rarely-read data is not paying hot-storage prices.
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.
Structured Logging	practice	Observability	Emitting log entries as machine-parseable key-value records rather than as formatted prose.
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.
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.
Technical Proposal Design Doc, RFC	practice	Architecture Communication	A written argument for a course of action, circulated for review before the work starts, structured so that disagreement surfaces early and cheaply.
Technology Radar	practice	Enterprise Architecture	A published, periodically-reviewed view of which technologies are endorsed, tolerated, being trialled, or to be avoided.
Telemetry Sampling	practice	Observability	Keeping a subset of traces or events to bound observability cost, chosen so the ones that matter survive.
Test Pyramid	practice	Software Architecture	A distribution of tests weighted towards many fast unit tests, fewer integration tests, and very few slow end-to-end tests.
Threat Modelling	practice	Security Architecture	A structured exercise that identifies what can go wrong with a design, before it is built, by walking the system's trust boundaries.
TOGAF	practice	Enterprise Architecture	An enterprise architecture framework whose central element is the ADM, an iterative cycle from vision through business, data, application and technology architecture to implementation governance.
Trade-off Analysis	practice	Meta-Skills	Making the costs of an architectural choice explicit and comparable, rather than presenting a recommendation as if it were free.
Trunk-Based Development	practice	Software Architecture	All developers integrating small changes into a single shared branch at least daily, with long-lived branches avoided entirely.
USE Method	practice	Observability	For every resource, track Utilisation, Saturation and Errors — the resource-centric complement to request-centric monitoring.
Well-Architected Review	practice	Cloud Architecture	A structured self-assessment of a workload against defined pillars — operational excellence, security, reliability, performance, cost, and sustainability.