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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
Network Performance Tuning practice Network Performance Tuning The application-level and connection-level changes that actually improve networked performance, in order of effect.
Non-Functional Acceptance practice Non-Functional Test Strategy Treating quality-attribute targets as acceptance criteria with automated verification, so a release can fail on latency the way it fails on a broken feature.
Non-Functional Budget Quality Attribute Budget, Latency Budget Allocation practice Functional vs Non-Functional Splitting a system-level quality target into per-component allowances with named owners, so a change can be shown to have spent someone's allowance rather than merely argued about.
Non-Functional Test Strategy practice Non-Functional Test Strategy The plan for how each quality attribute claim will be demonstrated, tying every NFR to a test that could falsify it.
Normalisation Normal Forms practice Relational Modelling Organising a schema so each fact is stored exactly once, removing the update anomalies that duplication creates.
Object Count Quota Resource Count Limit, Control-Plane Quota practice Platform Tenancy A per-tenant limit on how many control-plane objects a team may create, which is the control that prevents one team's design choice from exhausting the shared configuration store every other team depends on.
Obligation Mapping practice Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture Translating each legal or regulatory requirement into the specific design constraints it imposes, so that compliance becomes a set of testable properties rather than a document.
On-Call practice On-Call The rotation that responds to production problems — a system whose health is measured by whether the people in it can sustain being in it.
Operational Burden Assessment practice Managed vs Self-Managed Quantifying the ongoing engineering effort a self-managed component requires, so it can be compared honestly with a managed service's price.
Operational Readiness Go-Live Readiness, Launch Readiness practice Time to Market Defining go-live from the whole value stream rather than from the deployment, so the processes that receive a launch - returns, reconciliation, support, tax - are ready before customers arrive rather than week…
Options-With-Consequences Never Present a Binary, Costed Alternatives practice Explaining Trade-offs Presenting a technical constraint as a set of costed options rather than as an objection, so the decision moves to the person accountable for the consequence with the information they need.
Origin Isolation Sandbox Origin, User Content Origin practice Frontend Security Serving user-uploaded or untrusted content from a separate origin, so that content executing there has no access to the application's session, storage or DOM.
Origin Shield Parent Cache, Mid-Tier Cache practice Content Delivery Networks An intermediate cache tier between edge locations and origin, so that hundreds of simultaneous edge misses become a handful of origin requests.
Outbound Dependency Census Egress-Derived Dependency Inventory, External Dependency Reconciliation practice Context Diagrams Deriving the list of systems a product depends on from four independent machine-readable registers instead of from memory, then deciding which of them belong on a diagram and which belong in a register.
Outcome Measurement practice Outcome Measurement Determining whether an architectural change achieved what it was meant to — the step most often skipped, which is why the same mistakes recur.
Outlier Alerting Per-Tenant Alerting, Worst-Case Alerting practice Application Performance Monitoring Alerting on the worst-affected segment rather than on an aggregate, because in skewed populations the aggregate is dominated by the segment that is fine.
Over-the-Air Update OTA, Firmware Update practice OTA Updates Updating software on deployed physical devices remotely, where a failed update can require someone to physically visit the device.
Overrule Threshold Review Intervention Test, Reversibility Test for Reviewers practice Mentoring The stated rule a reviewer uses to decide when to impose their own design over a workable one - reversal cost and blast radius, not personal preference - so that authorship stays with the engineer everywhere i…
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.
Ownership-First Decomposition Assign Owners Before Splitting, Logical Before Physical practice Database Migration Assigning each table a single owning team before splitting any code or data, because the ownership step costs nothing, removes the worst of the coupling immediately, and makes every subsequent step tractable.
Pace-Layered Application Strategy Pace Layering, PACE Layers practice Application Portfolio Management Sorting applications by how fast the business needs them to change - records slowly, differentiators quarterly, innovations weekly - and giving each layer its own governance funding and integration rules inste…
Page and Ticket Routing practice Alerting Deciding for each monitored condition whether it warrants immediate human interruption or asynchronous handling, and enforcing the distinction.
Pager Boundary Platform On-Call Boundary, Injected Component Ownership Line practice Platform Engineering The written line in a platform contract that says which symptoms page the platform team and which page the consuming team, and how a single signal tells the two apart during an incident.
Pagination Design Cursor Pagination, Keyset Pagination practice Pagination & Filtering Returning large result sets in pages, where offset-based paging is both slow at depth and incorrect under concurrent writes.
Parallel Run practice Parallel Run Operating the old and new systems simultaneously on the same inputs and comparing outputs, to build evidence that the replacement is correct before relying on it.
Partial Deployment Verification Artefact Completeness Check, Fleet Convergence Verification practice Segregation of Duties Machine confirmation that every target in a fleet is running the intended artefact, independently checked, so that an incomplete rollout cannot present itself as a finished one.
Partner Onboarding practice Partner & B2B Integration The repeatable process by which an external organisation is connected, tested and moved to production — and a common hidden bottleneck.
Pattern Inventory Audit Analogy Frequency Audit, Prior Case Count practice Pattern Recognition Counting which prior cases you argued from across your own last twenty written decisions, to find the analogy you apply too often before it costs a design - a frequency measurement rather than a check of one p…
Pattern Recognition practice Pattern Recognition Recognising that a new problem is an instance of a known one — the main source of an experienced architect's speed, and of their characteristic errors.
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.
Paved Road Telemetry practice Platform Telemetry Instrumenting the platform's own usage — where teams succeed, where they stall, where they leave — so its roadmap is driven by evidence.
PCI DSS Scope Reduction practice PCI-DSS Scoping Deliberately limiting which systems handle cardholder data so that the audited estate is small, since every in-scope system carries the full control burden.
Peak Event Readiness practice Peak Event Readiness Preparing for a known, dated, high-stakes traffic event — where the discipline is as much organisational as technical.
Peak Readiness Rehearsal Pre-Event Verification, Scheduled Peak Drill practice Peak Event Readiness The set of pre-peak actions and verifications - warm caches, warm pools, confirmed dependency headroom, a change freeze, a rehearsed shedding path - without which correct capacity still fails.
Performance Budget practice Performance Budgets A stated numeric limit on a performance characteristic, enforced automatically so that regressions fail a build rather than accumulating.
Performance Budget Enforcement practice Web Performance Budgets A stated limit on bundle size or a timing metric that fails a build when exceeded, which is what turns performance from a periodic project into a constraint.
Performance Budget for Backends practice Performance Budgets A latency or resource allowance allocated per component of a request path, so that the end-to-end target is composed rather than hoped for.
Performance Test Design practice Performance Test Design Constructing a load test whose result predicts production behaviour rather than merely producing numbers.
Pipeline Anomaly Detection practice Data Observability Monitoring row counts, distributions, freshness and schema for unexplained change, because data pipelines fail silently far more often than they error.
Pipeline Credential Scope OIDC Federation for CI, Workload Identity for CI practice Pipeline Secrets Granting a pipeline short-lived, narrowly scoped identity for exactly the environment it is deploying to, rather than a long-lived key.
Pipeline Orchestration practice ETL & ELT Coordinating the execution of data tasks by dependency rather than by clock, with retries, backfill and observability built in.
Platform API Deprecation practice Platform API Deprecation Retiring a platform capability that other teams depend on, with the migration burden treated as the platform's problem rather than theirs.
Platform as a Product practice Platform as a Product Running an internal platform with users, a roadmap and adoption metrics — because a platform that must be mandated is one that has not earned its use.
Platform as a Product practice Platform as a Product Running an internal platform with the disciplines of a product — voluntary adoption, user research, documentation and a roadmap — rather than as a mandated standard.
Platform as Product practice Platform Funding Running an internal platform with a product manager, a roadmap, identified users and measured adoption, rather than as a project with an end date.
Platform Team Product Model practice Platform Teams Running an internal platform team with product management disciplines — users, roadmap, support, metrics — rather than as an infrastructure function.
Platform Telemetry practice Platform Telemetry Instrumentation of the platform itself — who uses which capability, how long it takes and where it fails — used as product evidence, not just operations.
Platform User Research practice Platform Engineering Treating engineers as users whose actual behaviour is observed rather than assumed, which is what separates a platform from a set of shared tools.
Point of No Return Rollback Horizon, Commit Point practice Cutover Planning The step in a migration after which rollback would lose data or state - identified in advance, with a named authoriser and a stated recovery plan beyond it.
Point-in-Time Reconstruction As-At Reporting, Reproducible Submission practice Regulatory Reporting Pipelines The ability to regenerate a past report from the data and rules as they stood then - without which a regenerated figure differs from the submitted one and the difference cannot be explained.
Policy as Code Compliance as Code, Automated Control, Executable Policy practice Architecture Compliance Checks Expressing controls as executable rules evaluated automatically against real system state, so that compliance is demonstrated continuously over the whole population rather than asserted in a document and sampl…
Policy as Code Guardrail Policy practice Policy as Code Expressing organisational rules as executable code evaluated automatically in pipelines and at admission, instead of as prose enforced by review.
Portfolio Assessment Matrix practice Application Portfolio Management Plotting each application on business value against technical quality, producing a disposition for every system in the estate.
Postmortems Incident Review, Blameless Postmortem practice Postmortems Structured learning from an incident, conducted so that the truth is obtainable — which requires that telling it is safe.
Power-Interest Grid practice Stakeholder Analysis A classification of stakeholders by their influence over a decision and their level of concern with it, used to allocate communication effort deliberately.
Pragmatism practice Meta-Skills Preferring the simplest architecture that satisfies the requirements, and treating additional structure as a cost that must be justified.
Pre-Mortem practice Failure Thinking An exercise in which a team imagines a project has already failed and explains why, surfacing risks that a forward-looking risk assessment misses.
Pre-Read Alignment Blocker Pre-Socialisation, Objection Absorption practice Facilitation Speaking to the two or three people whose objection would block a decision before circulating the proposal, so the session confirms a decision rather than discovering a conflict.
Pre-Scaling Scheduled Scaling, Warm Provisioning, Capacity Staging practice Peak Event Readiness Provisioning capacity in advance of a known event rather than relying on autoscaling, because the arrival spike at a scheduled moment is faster than any reactive control loop can respond to.
Pre-Scaling Scheduled Scaling, Predictive Scaling practice Autoscaling Provisioning capacity before demand arrives, based on a forecast or a known event, because autoscaling cannot respond faster than its provisioning loop.