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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
Precondition Audit Pattern Fit Check, Applicability Test, Assumption Check practice First-Principles Reasoning Explicitly stating the conditions a pattern assumes and checking each against your situation - which is where pattern matching becomes judgement rather than recall.
Precondition Check Pattern Assumption Test, Does This Fit practice First-Principles Reasoning Testing whether a problem's conditions match the assumptions a familiar pattern encodes - the ten-minute exercise that separates useful pattern reuse from cargo-culting.
Preparatory Refactoring Enabling Refactor, Prepare-Then-Change practice Refactoring Reshaping existing code first so the behaviour change that follows is small, keeping the two in separate commits with separate claims about what is true.
Presentation Skills practice Presentation Skills Presenting architecture so a specific audience can make a decision — which requires knowing which decision and adapting everything to it.
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.
Preventive Guardrail Policy as Prevention, Deny-by-Default Control practice Cloud Governance A control that makes a non-compliant action impossible, rather than detecting it afterwards and generating a ticket.
Principle Rationale practice Architecture Principles The stated reasoning and implications attached to an architecture principle, without which the principle cannot be applied to a case its authors did not foresee.
Principle Statement Format Statement-Rationale-Implication, Testable Principle practice Architecture Principles The four-part shape - statement, rationale, implications, exceptions - that turns an architecture principle from a preference into something that actually rules options out.
Prioritisation practice Prioritisation Choosing what to work on when everything is important — by leverage, constraint and irreversibility rather than by urgency.
Privacy by Design practice Privacy by Design Building data protection into the architecture from the first design decision rather than adding controls to a system already built.
Privacy Engineering practice Privacy Engineering Building systems whose privacy properties come from their structure rather than from policy documents.
Privacy Loss Accounting Budget Composition Tracking, Epsilon Accounting practice Privacy-Enhancing Technologies Tracking cumulative privacy loss across every statistic released from a dataset, because differential privacy's guarantee holds over the whole publication rather than per query - and once the budget is spent, …
Producer-Enforced Contract Contract That Fails the Build, Upstream Enforcement practice Data Contracts A data contract checked in the producing team's own pipeline, so a breaking change is blocked before it ships - without which the contract is documentation and the breakage is discovered downstream.
Profiling practice Profiling Attributing resource consumption to specific code paths — the tool for "why is this slow" once you know where.
Profiling and Optimisation practice Profiling & Optimisation The discipline of measuring before changing, optimising the dominant term, and stopping when the objective is met.
Progress-Based Liveness Are-You-Making-Progress Check, Beyond Heartbeats practice Leader Election Detecting a leader or worker that is alive but not advancing, by checking whether work is progressing rather than whether the process responds.
Progressive Rollout Wave Deployment, Staged Rollout practice Multi-Region Rollout Deploying across regions or cells in ordered waves with soak time between them, so a defect is contained to the earliest wave.
Progressive Shutdown Graceful Decommissioning, Staged Retirement practice Decommissioning Retiring a system through reversible stages - read-only, then blocked, then stopped, then removed - so each stage surfaces remaining consumers safely instead of breaking them.
Prompt Injection Defence practice Prompt Injection Defence Defending systems where untrusted content reaches a language model that can take actions — a problem of privilege, not of filtering.
Prompt Regression Suite practice Prompt & Version Management A set of test cases with expected properties, run against a prompt on every change, to detect quality regressions before deployment.
Prompt Versioning practice Prompt & Version Management Treating prompts as versioned, reviewed, tested and deployable artifacts rather than as strings edited in place.
Protected Allocation Ring-Fenced Capacity, Non-Negotiated Investment practice Portfolio Prioritisation A fixed share of capacity reserved for a category of work that loses every individual comparison against features - because the aggregate outcome would otherwise be nobody's decision.
Provider Capability Matrix Integration Support Grid, Honest Capability Declaration practice Integration Patterns An explicit per-provider record of which normalised capabilities are genuinely supported, which are approximated and which are unavailable - published as a product feature rather than kept as internal documentation.
Provider Exit Plan practice Exit & Concentration Risk A documented and tested plan for moving a workload off a provider, whose credibility is measured by what has actually been rehearsed rather than described.
Provider Verification practice Contract Testing The provider-side stage that replays every consumer's recorded expectations against the real implementation.
Provisioning Reconciliation Orphan Sweep, Convergent Provisioning practice Self-Service Provisioning Running a scheduled comparison between what a self-service platform intended to create and what actually exists in the cloud account, so partial failures become a tracked number rather than an invoice surprise.
Provisioning Self-Service practice Self-Service Provisioning Teams obtaining infrastructure without a ticket, within bounds that make the request safe by construction rather than by review.
Pseudo-Locale Testing Pseudo-Localisation, Accented Locale practice Internationalisation Rendering the interface with algorithmically transformed strings - lengthened, accented, direction-reversed - to expose internationalisation defects before any translation exists.
Pseudonymisation practice Pseudonymisation Replacing identifying fields with a reference so records cannot be attributed to a person without separately held additional information.
Public Incident Narrative Public Postmortem practice Written Communication An externally published account of an outage that transfers the diagnostic search rather than a conclusion - the timeline that was read, the hypotheses that were wrong and the practice gap that allowed it.
Purpose Binding Purpose Metadata, Use Limitation Tagging practice Lawful Basis & Purpose Limitation Recording with the data the purpose it was collected for, and carrying that constraint through derivation, so a later use can be checked against what was agreed at collection.
Quality and Testing Strategy practice Testing & Quality Architecture How an organisation obtains confidence that changes are safe — a portfolio decision about where to spend limited verification effort.
Quality Attribute Scenario QA Scenario, Testable NFR practice Quality Attributes A six-part template that turns a vague quality goal into something you can measure and argue about.
Quality Gate Threshold practice Quality Gates The specific numeric bar a change must clear, and the perverse incentives it creates when chosen carelessly.
Quality Ratchet Boy Scout Rule, Improvement Ratchet practice Refactoring An automated rule ensuring a codebase can only improve on a chosen dimension - new code meets the standard, existing code improves when touched, and regression is blocked.
Quantified Risk Estimate practice Risk Assessment Methods Expressing a risk as a probability distribution over financial loss rather than as a colour, which makes risks comparable and mitigations arguable on cost.
Query Cost Analysis Query Complexity Limiting, Cost-Based Rate Limiting practice GraphQL Computing the resource cost of a client-specified query before executing it, so that an API which lets clients define their own requests cannot be asked to do unbounded work.
Query Optimisation practice Query Optimisation Making the database do less work — usually by removing round trips and rows rather than by rewriting clever SQL.
Queue Length Estimation practice Little's Law Using the relationship between arrival rate, residence time and items in the system to size pools, predict backlogs and sanity-check capacity claims.
Radar Ring Semantics practice Technology Radar The meaning attached to each ring of a technology radar, which determines whether it guides decisions or merely lists opinions.
Rate Limit Design Token Bucket, Sliding Window practice Rate Limiting The algorithm, scope and response behaviour that determine whether throttling protects the service and treats callers fairly.
Reachability Triage Exploitability Prioritisation, Vulnerability Relevance practice Supply Chain Security Prioritising dependency vulnerabilities by whether the vulnerable code path is actually reachable and exploitable in your application, rather than by severity score - which is what makes vulnerability manageme…
Reasoning Under Uncertainty practice Judgement Under Uncertainty Making decisions with incomplete information — by classifying the uncertainty, buying information cheaply, and preferring reversible moves.
Recorded Assumption Named Assumption with Trigger, Invisible-to-Monitored practice Deciding Under Uncertainty Writing down the assumption a decision rests on, with the condition that would invalidate it - which converts an invisible dependency into a monitored one.
Recorded Interaction Corpus Traffic-Recorded Fixtures, Captured Interaction Set practice Service Virtualisation A set of real request and response pairs captured from a live dependency and used to build and continuously re-verify its stand-in, so the fake reproduces evidence rather than the author's assumptions.
Records Retention and Legal Hold practice Records Retention & Legal Hold The obligation to keep specified records for a defined period, and to suspend all deletion for material relevant to anticipated litigation.
RED Method practice Observability A minimal per-service dashboard: Rate, Errors, Duration — the request-centric view of whether users are being served.
Red Teaming a Model practice Model Evaluation & Red-Teaming Adversarial testing of a model or AI system to find inputs that produce harmful, incorrect or policy-violating outputs before users do.
Refactor and Re-architect practice Refactoring & Re-architecting Changing the application's structure — the most expensive migration strategy, justified only where the structure itself is the constraint.
Refactoring practice Software Architecture Changing the internal structure of code without changing its external behaviour, in small verified steps.
Refactoring Under Test practice Refactoring Changing internal structure without changing behaviour, with tests as the mechanism that makes the claim verifiable.
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.
Reference Call Practitioner Call, Production Reference Check practice Research & Evaluation A structured conversation with an engineer running the technology in production at your scale, which is the only evidence source that reveals operability, upgrade pain and vendor behaviour before you commit.
Reference Implementation practice Reference Architectures A working example of a reference architecture that teams can run, read and copy, as opposed to a document describing one.
Reference Model Tailoring Tailoring Record, Reference Architecture Subsetting practice Reference Models Recording which elements of an adopted reference model you kept, replaced or dropped and why, so a deliberately smaller architecture stays defensible instead of reading as non-compliance.
Referentially Consistent Subset Database Subsetting, Coherent Test Slice practice Test Data Management A small extract of a production-shaped database in which every referenced row is present, so a test suite runs against realistic structure at a size that fits an ephemeral per-change environment.
Region Selection Criteria practice Single vs Multi-Region The factors determining where workloads run, in which data residency and latency usually dominate cost.
Region Strategy practice Single vs Multi-Region How many regions, where, and in what topology — driven by residency, latency and availability requirements rather than by ambition.
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.