Terminology

2185 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 areas2185 Architecture Fundamentals77 Distributed Systems107 Data Architecture110 Cloud Architecture89 Networking88 API & Integration Architecture82 Reliability & Resilience75 Observability70 Performance & Capacity Engineering72 Security Architecture81 Cost Architecture & FinOps66 Business Architecture67 Architecture Communication67 Enterprise Architecture66 Legacy Modernization66 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 concept785 practice729 pattern362 metric125 case-study77 tool62 protocol45

7 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
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.
Fan-out Threshold Celebrity Threshold, Hybrid Fan-out Switch	practice	Publish/Subscribe	The membership or follower count at which a system switches from pushing to recipients to having recipients pull - and the monitoring that keeps the classification correct.
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.
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.
Saga Compensation Design	practice	Saga	Designing the undo actions for a distributed transaction, where compensation is a new business action rather than a rollback.
Seam Identification	practice	Strangler Fig	Locating the places in a legacy system where behaviour can be intercepted and redirected, which determines whether an incremental migration is feasible at all.
Shard Key Selection	practice	Sharding Patterns	Choosing the attribute that determines a record's partition, which fixes the system's distribution, query patterns and future flexibility.