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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
Deployment Diagrams practice Deployment Diagrams Where software actually runs — regions, zones, clusters, networks — and therefore what fails together.
Deployment Freeze Change Freeze, Code Freeze practice Change Management vs CD A period during which deployments are prohibited, intended to protect a high-stakes business window.
Deployment Gate Quality Gate, Approval Gate practice Deployment Gates A condition a change must satisfy before it advances, whether evaluated by a machine or signed by a person.
Deprecation Brownout Sunset Rehearsal, Scheduled Dark Window practice Backward Compatibility An announced, time-boxed window in which a deprecated interface returns its retirement error, used to convert an abstract sunset date into a failure the consumer sees in their own monitoring.
Deprecation Window practice Platform API Deprecation The stated period between announcing that an internal interface will be removed and removing it, with the removal actually happening at the end.
Design Authority practice Design Authority The body or role that approves significant designs — valuable when it improves decisions, harmful when it becomes a queue.
Design Review Trigger practice Security Design Review The stated conditions under which a change requires security review, so that review capacity goes to what warrants it and everything else proceeds.
Deterministic Tokenisation practice Tokenisation & Masking Replacing a sensitive value with a stable surrogate so the same input always yields the same token, preserving joins while removing the value.
Device Class Baseline Reference Device, Slow-Tier Baseline practice Web Performance Budgets A named device and network profile, chosen from the slow end of your real user population, against which every performance budget and acceptance test is measured - so that "fast" means fast for the users who a…
Device Group Rollout practice Fleet Management Applying configuration or firmware to a fleet in ordered cohorts with health checks between them, because a bad change applied to everything at once has no remedy.
Device Provisioning practice Device Provisioning Giving a device a unique cryptographic identity and its initial configuration in a way that scales to millions and survives a hostile supply chain.
Diagram Notation Consistency practice Architecture Diagrams Using shapes, colours, line styles and arrow directions to mean the same thing across every diagram, and stating what they mean on the diagram itself.
Diagram Provenance Diagram Dating, Generated-From Line practice Data-Flow Diagrams A line on every diagram stating what it was generated from, when, and when it will next be refreshed, so readers can weigh its accuracy instead of assuming it.
Diagrams as Code Architecture as Code, Textual Diagram Model practice Architecture Diagrams Keeping architecture pictures as text in the same repository as the code they describe, so a structural change and its diagram are reviewed in one pull request instead of drifting apart.
Differential Profiling Profile Diffing, Comparative Profiling practice Profiling Comparing two normalised profiles of one workload to attribute a performance change to a specific code path - the step that turns "release 2.4 is slower" into a named function, and the normalisation errors tha…
Differentiation Test practice Build vs Buy The question of whether a capability is a source of competitive advantage, used as the primary filter in build-versus-buy decisions.
Disagree and Commit Principled Dissent, Recorded Objection, Commit With Trigger practice Handling Disagreement Recording a dissent with its reasoning and a monitorable revisit trigger, then executing the chosen approach wholeheartedly - which preserves both the organisation's ability to move and the record needed to learn.
Disaster Recovery DR practice Reliability & Resilience The plan and capability for restoring service after an event that takes out a whole site, region or system.
Disposition Decision practice The Six Rs Choosing one of the standard migration treatments for each application, on the basis of its value, condition and the constraint that is actually binding.
Diátaxis Framework Diátaxis, Four-Mode Documentation practice Documentation Practice A placement rule for technical documentation that separates four reader needs - tutorial, how-to, reference and explanation - so one page serves one need instead of mixing all four and serving none.
DNS TTL Strategy practice DNS Choosing record lifetimes to balance failover speed against query volume, knowing that resolvers and clients do not reliably honour them.
Documentation Practice practice Documentation Practice Writing what will be read, keeping it true, and deliberately not writing the rest.
Domain Boundaries from the Business practice Domain Boundaries Deriving service boundaries from the language and decisions of the business, rather than from data structure or team structure.
Domain Publishing Readiness Data Product Admission Bar, Domain Onboarding Gate practice Data Mesh The small set of capabilities a domain team must demonstrably have before it is allowed to publish a data product, which is what separates decentralised ownership from renaming existing teams as domains.
Domain-Driven Design DDD practice Software Architecture Modelling software around the business domain, with boundaries drawn where the language of the business changes.
Drift Reconciliation Post-Incident Codification, Managed Divergence practice Infrastructure as Code Treating divergence between declared and actual infrastructure as an expected condition with an owned resolution path, rather than as a violation to be automatically reverted.
EA Framework Selection practice EA Frameworks Choosing how much formal enterprise architecture method an organisation needs, on the basis that most need considerably less than the frameworks describe.
Edge Policy Ordering Gateway Filter Order, Admission Sequence practice API Gateway The sequence in which a gateway applies connection limits, authentication, quotas and validation, which decides whether a flood of unauthenticated traffic consumes your cheapest resource or your most expensive one.
Egress Filtering practice Network Security Restricting what a workload may connect out to, which is the control that turns a compromise into a contained one.
Egress Path Analysis practice Network & Egress Costs Tracing where data physically moves in an architecture, because transfer charges follow paths that appear nowhere on the diagram.
Egress-First Cost Modelling Bandwidth-Dominant Costing, Cost Order of Magnitude practice Cloud Architecture Establishing which cost category actually dominates before optimising anything - because in media-heavy consumer platforms the order is usually bandwidth, then storage, then compute, which is the inverse of wh…
Embedding Model Migration practice Embeddings The process of moving a corpus to a new embedding model, which requires re-embedding everything because vectors from different models are not comparable.
Encryption at Rest and in Transit practice Security Architecture Protecting stored data from disclosure if the medium is obtained, and network data from disclosure if the path is observed — two different controls against two different threats.
Enterprise Architecture EA Practice, Architecture Function practice Enterprise Architecture The practice of owning the architectural decisions whose costs and benefits land on different teams or outside any team's planning horizon - the decisions competent delivery teams have no incentive or informat…
Enterprise Integration Patterns EIP practice API & Integration A catalogue of named, composable messaging patterns — router, translator, aggregator, splitter, filter, dead letter channel — that gives integration work a shared vocabulary.
Environment Strategy practice Environment Strategy The deliberate choice of how many pre-production environments exist, what each is for, and how faithfully each mirrors production.
Error Budget Reliability Budget, SLO Budget, Failure Allowance practice Error Budgets The permitted amount of unreliability implied by an SLO, used as an automatic arbiter between shipping features and improving reliability - and, when unspent, as evidence that the system is more reliable than …
Error Budget Policy practice Error Budgets The pre-agreed consequences of exhausting an error budget, which is what turns an SLO from a metric into a decision-making mechanism.
Escalation Threshold practice Human in the Loop The rule determining when a model's output is acted on automatically and when it is routed to a person.
Escape Hatch Progressive Disclosure, Drop-Down Path practice Abstraction Level Choice A supported route from a platform's simple default down to the underlying primitives - so a team with an unusual need adapts within the platform rather than leaving it.
Estimate Range With Narrowing Cost Three-Part Estimate, Buy Certainty practice Estimation Answering an estimation question with a range, the drivers of its width, and what it would cost to narrow it - which turns an estimation problem into a decision the asker can make.
Estimation Range practice Estimation Expressing an estimate as an interval with a stated confidence rather than as a single number, because a point estimate misrepresents what is known.
Ethical Impact Assessment practice Ethics in Architecture Deliberately examining who could be harmed by a system and how, at the point in design where the answer can still change the outcome.
ETL and ELT practice ETL & ELT Whether to transform before loading or after — a choice that follows from where compute is cheap and who owns the transformation.
Event Versioning practice Event-Driven Integration Evolving event schemas without breaking consumers that may read messages written months earlier.
Evidence Based Approval practice Change Advisory vs Automated Gates Replacing a human judgement about whether a change is safe with a machine-produced record of the checks it passed, assessed once for the class rather than per instance.
Evidence by Construction practice Audit Evidence Designing systems so that operating them produces the audit evidence automatically, rather than reconstructing it from screenshots when an assessment arrives.
Evidence By-Product Evidence Automation, Continuous Evidence practice Audit Evidence Audit evidence produced automatically by the control operating, rather than assembled by engineers before each audit.
Evolutionary Architecture practice Architecture Fundamentals Designing for guided, incremental change rather than trying to get the structure right once, up front.
Exception and Waiver Management practice Exception & Waiver Management The formal process for permitting a deviation from a standard, with a named risk owner, a stated expiry and a remediation plan.
Exception Register Waiver Management, Control Deviation Record, Risk Acceptance Log practice Exception & Waiver Management A recorded, owned, time-bounded set of approved deviations from a control - which is what makes a control survivable, and whose aggregate is the best available evidence about whether the control fits reality.
Exception Register Waiver Log, Standard Deviation Record practice Technology Standards A record of every deviation from a standard, with approver, rationale and review date - which makes violations deliberate rather than silent and tells you whether the standard describes the right rule.
Executive Communication practice Presenting to Executives Presenting technical matters to an audience that owns outcomes and money, in a form that supports a decision within their attention span.
Executive Summary Discipline practice Presenting to Executives Leading with the recommendation and its business consequence, compressed to what an executive audience can act on in a few minutes.
Expand and Contract Migration Parallel Change, Expand-Migrate-Contract practice Data Governance Changing a schema through a sequence of individually backward-compatible steps, so old and new application versions can run simultaneously.
Explained-Difference Criterion Shadow Exit Criterion, Zero Unexplained Differences practice Parallel Run Ending a shadow or parallel run when every observed difference has been explained, rather than when differences reach zero - because zero is unachievable and unexplained differences are by definition the dange…
Explaining Trade-offs practice Explaining Trade-offs Presenting a choice so that the audience can exercise the judgement that is genuinely theirs, in the terms they actually think in.
Explicit Staleness As-Of Semantics, Freshness Disclosure practice Digital Twin Publishing how old a modelled or cached value is alongside the value itself, so consumers can judge whether it is usable rather than assuming it is current.
Facilitation practice Facilitation Running a discussion so that a group reaches a decision — a distinct skill from having the best answer.
Facilitation Neutrality practice Facilitation Separating the role of running a discussion from the role of advocating within it, because one person cannot do both credibly.