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
Knowledge Deprecation Deliberate Unlearning, Skill Retirement	practice	Continuous Learning	Deliberately retiring expertise that has stopped predicting behaviour, keeping the invariants it taught and dropping the product surface, so a fixed learning budget is not consumed by maintaining currency nobo…
KPI Attribution Chain Benefit Attribution Chain, Metric Causal Chain	practice	Business KPIs	The explicit path from an architecture change through an operational metric and a short-lag product metric to the business measure finance reports - with the lag and the counterfactual named - so the benefit c…
Label Inheritance Classification Propagation, Sensitivity Inheritance	practice	Sensitivity Labelling	Automatically assigning a derived dataset the highest sensitivity of its inputs, so that aggregates and transformations do not silently escape the controls that applied to their sources.
Last Responsible Moment	practice	Evolutionary Architecture	Defer an irreversible decision until the cost of deferring exceeds the cost of deciding - and define in advance the signal that says the moment has arrived.
Late-Data Policy Lateness Handling, Allowed Lateness	practice	Watermarks & Late Data	The explicit decision about what happens to an event that arrives after its window has closed - drop it, route it aside, or update the emitted result.
Latency Budget Decomposition	practice	Latency	Allocating a total response-time target across the components of a request path, so each layer has an explicit share and overruns are attributable.
Layer Enforcement Ratchet Violation Baseline, Architecture Debt Ratchet, Boundary Gate with Baseline	practice	Layered Architecture	Gating a layering rule on a recorded baseline of existing violations that may shrink but never grow, so an architectural boundary becomes mechanical on a legacy codebase without a cleanup project first.
Layout Space Reservation Shift Prevention, Dimension Reservation	practice	Core Web Vitals	Allocating space for content before it arrives, so that late-loading elements fill a gap rather than displacing what the user is already reading.
Least-Privilege Tooling Bounded Tool Permissions	practice	Prompt Injection Defence	Giving each tool the narrowest possible capability and enforcing authorisation at the tool - the decisive control when a model's instructions can be influenced by untrusted content.
Legacy Assessment	practice	Legacy Assessment	Establishing what a legacy system actually does, what depends on it, and what it costs, before deciding what to do with it.
Legacy Headroom Budget Legacy Capacity Allocation, Integration Throughput Quota	practice	Legacy Integration Patterns	The measured spare throughput of a legacy system after retry amplification, batch overlap and organic growth are deducted, allocated to new consumers as enforced quotas rather than published as available capacity.
Legacy Integration	practice	Legacy Integration	Connecting modern services to systems that cannot be changed — where the constraints are as much commercial and operational as technical.
Legacy Side-Effect Inventory Trigger Inventory, Write Consequence Map	practice	Strangler Fig	The enumerated list of triggers, stored procedures, scheduled jobs and integrations that fire as a consequence of a legacy write, which determines whether a capability can be moved incrementally at all.
Legacy System Assessment	practice	Legacy Assessment	A structured evaluation of a system's business value, technical condition and risk, used to decide what to do with it rather than to describe it.
Legal Hold	practice	Records Retention & Legal Hold	Suspending deletion for specific records because of anticipated litigation or investigation, which must override the retention schedule and be provable.
Little's Law Applied to Pools	practice	Connection Pooling	Using L = λW to size connection and thread pools from measured throughput and latency rather than from a default.
LLM Evaluation Evals	practice	AI-Era Architecture	A repeatable measurement of whether an AI system's outputs are good enough, on cases that reflect the actual task.
LLM-as-Judge	practice	LLM Evaluation	Using a language model to score another model's outputs against criteria, making evaluation scalable at the cost of introducing the judge's own biases.
Load Balancer Pre-Warming LCU Reservation, Balancer Warm-Up	practice	Load Balancing	Reserving or requesting minimum load-balancer capacity before a scheduled step change in traffic - because a managed balancer is itself an autoscaled fleet whose provisioning loop is slower than a product laun…
Load Testing	practice	Performance & Capacity	Driving a system with realistic traffic at a target volume to verify it meets its performance targets before real users do.
Load Testing in Practice	practice	Load Testing	Verifying behaviour under expected load — where realism of workload and data matters more than the number of virtual users.
Load-Coupled Fault Injection Fault Injection Under Load, Contention Testing	practice	Chaos Engineering	Injecting dependency faults while the system is at realistic peak load, because timeouts, pool sizes and breaker thresholds only reveal whether they are correct under contention.
Locale Aware Formatting	practice	Internationalisation	Rendering dates, numbers, currencies and names according to the user's locale rather than the developer's, using the platform rather than hand-written logic.
Log Level Discipline	practice	Logging	Consistent semantics for log severity so that levels can be used for routing, alerting and cost control.
Log Management	practice	Log Management	The pipeline, storage, retention and access model for logs — where cost and compliance meet operational need.
Log Retention Tiering	practice	Log Management	Storing log data at different resolutions, costs and access latencies according to how old it is and how likely it is to be queried.
Log Sampling Budget Log Volume Budget, Log Ingest Quota	practice	Logging	An owned per-service allowance of log volume, spent by deciding which record classes are kept whole and which are sampled by trace - the control that turns an invisible shared cost into a decision a team makes…
Log Schema Consistency	practice	Structured Logging	Enforcing the same field names, types and semantics for structured log records across every service, so cross-service queries are possible.
Logging	practice	Logging	Emitting events a human or a query can reason about later — where the discipline is structure, sampling and what you refuse to log.
Logical Date Partitioning Execution Date, Idempotent Reprocessing	practice	Batch Orchestration	Making every batch task a pure function of a logical date, so that any run can be repeated safely and a backfill is a range of independent executions.
Machine-Checkable Standard Executable Standard, Automated Conformance Rule	practice	Architecture Governance	An architecture rule written so that a program can decide whether a change complies, enforced at merge or deploy time, which is the only form of governance whose capacity scales with the rate of change.
Mainframe Modernisation	practice	Mainframe Modernization	Replacing or reducing dependence on a core system that is reliable, undocumented, and central to the business.
Managed versus Self-Managed	practice	Managed vs Self-Managed	Whether to run a component yourself — a decision that should default to managed and require a specific articulated reason to deviate.
Manual Fallback Capacity Degraded-Mode Throughput, Paper-Process Capacity	practice	Business Continuity	The transactions per hour a business can actually complete without its system - the measured number that says whether a recovery-time objective is survivable and how long the catch-up takes.
Master Data Management MDM, Golden Record	practice	Master Data Management	Establishing a single authoritative version of core business entities that appear inconsistently across many systems.
Material Outsourcing Notification	practice	Sector Cloud Rules	The regulatory obligation to inform a supervisor before placing a critical function with a third party, which puts cloud adoption on a timeline architecture must respect.
Materialised Read Model Projection, Read Model	practice	CQRS	A precomputed, query-shaped copy of data maintained asynchronously from the system of record - and the operational obligations that come with it.
Mentoring	practice	Mentoring	Developing other people's architectural judgement — the highest-leverage activity available to a senior architect.
Mentoring Ladder	practice	Mentoring	Adjusting the level of direction given to someone according to their experience with the specific task, from demonstration through to sponsorship.
Merge Queue Merge Train, Serialised Integration	practice	Continuous Integration Discipline	Testing each change against the combination that will actually exist after merge, rather than against the base it was written on - preventing the broken trunk that concurrent merges produce.
Metadata Harvesting	practice	Data Catalog	Populating a catalogue automatically from the systems that hold the data, because anything requiring manual entry will be incomplete within a quarter.
Metric Certification Certified Metrics, Trusted Tier	practice	BI Governance	Marking a small set of metrics and datasets as governed and authoritative, so that exploration stays free while anything asserted about the business comes from a controlled definition.
Migration Risk	practice	Migration Risk	The specific risks migrations carry, and the controls that reduce each — with reversibility as the master control.
Migration Risk Register	practice	Migration Risk	A maintained record of what could go wrong in a migration, with likelihood, impact, owner and mitigation, reviewed as the programme progresses.
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.
Mobile Release Strategy	practice	Mobile Release Strategy	Shipping to an app store where review adds latency, users choose when to update, and old versions therefore stay live indefinitely.
Model Drift Monitoring	practice	AI Observability	Detecting that a deployed model's inputs or performance have shifted away from the conditions it was validated under.
Model Graph Pruning Removing Unused Models, DAG Hygiene	practice	Transformation Frameworks	Periodically removing transformation models with no downstream consumers - the cheapest available reduction in a build's cost and duration, and the one nobody owns.
Model Inventory AI Register, Model Registry, Deployed Model Catalogue	practice	Model Risk Management	A complete record of every model deployed in the organisation with its owner, purpose, risk tier and review date - the precondition for any AI governance, and the thing most organisations do not have.
Model Inventory Model Register, AI System Register	practice	Model Risk Management	A maintained register of every model making or informing decisions - the prerequisite without which no other model governance control can be applied.
Model Risk Management MRM, SR 11-7	practice	Model Risk Management	The discipline of governing the risk that a model is wrong, is used incorrectly, or is applied outside the conditions it was built for.
Modernisation Business Case	practice	Modernisation Business Case	Justifying modernisation work, where the benefits are diffuse, the costs are concrete, and "it is old" persuades nobody.
Modernisation Value Case	practice	Modernisation Business Case	The argument that funds a modernisation programme, built on quantified business consequence rather than on technical obsolescence.
Module Dependency Enforcement	practice	Modular Monolith	Automated checks that prevent one module from importing another's internals, giving a monolith the boundary discipline of separate services.
Move Group Migration Affinity Group, Move Wave Affinity Set	practice	Rehosting	The set of workloads that must cross to the new infrastructure in the same wave because the round trips between them sit on a user-facing critical path, derived from observed network flows rather than from the…
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.
Multi-Window Multi-Burn-Rate Alerting	practice	SLO Monitoring	Alerting on how fast an error budget is being consumed, over two time windows simultaneously, to get both fast detection and few false alarms.
Mutation Scope Selection Incremental Mutation Analysis, Diff-Scoped Mutation Testing	practice	Mutation Testing	Restricting mutation analysis to the lines a change touches and to code whose failure is expensive, so a technique that costs one to two orders of magnitude more than the test suite still fits inside a pull-re…
Narrative Arc	practice	Presentation Skills	Structuring a technical presentation as a problem, tension and resolution rather than as an ordered dump of findings.
Negotiation	practice	Negotiation	Reaching decisions with people whose objectives differ — by working from interests rather than positions, and by making trades explicit.