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

27 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Account Vending	practice	Landing Zones	Automated creation of new cloud accounts pre-configured with the organisation's networking, identity, logging, guardrails and cost allocation.
Application Discovery	practice	Cloud Migration	Establishing what applications exist, what they depend on, who owns them and whether anyone uses them — the step whose absence makes every later step a guess.
Backup Restore Testing	practice	Backup Strategies	Periodically performing a full restore and measuring it, on the basis that an untested backup is a hypothesis rather than a capability.
Backup Strategy 3-2-1 Rule	practice	Cloud Architecture	A plan for what is copied, how often, where to, how long it is kept, and — the part that decides whether it is real — how the restore is verified.
Blast Radius Reduction	practice	Cloud Architecture	The set of deliberate partitions — accounts, regions, zones, cells, tenants, deployment stages — that bound how far any single failure or compromise can reach.
Cloud Disaster Recovery	practice	Disaster Recovery	Designing and rehearsing recovery from the loss of a zone, a region or a provider — where the plan is worth exactly as much as its last test.
Cloud Exit Plan	practice	Multi-Cloud	A documented, costed assessment of what leaving a provider or service would require — increasingly a regulatory expectation and a better lock-in control than portability itself.
Cloud Governance	practice	Cloud Governance	The account structure, identity model, guardrails and cost attribution that make a cloud estate operable by many teams without becoming ungovernable.
Cloud Migration	practice	Cloud Migration	Moving workloads to the cloud — where the strategy per workload matters more than the programme, and where lift-and-shift produces the bill that discredits the whole effort.
Cold-Start Amortisation Warm Affinity, Startup Cost Reduction	practice	Serverless	Attacking the startup cost itself - through snapshots, lazy image pulls, local artefact caches and affinity routing - rather than choosing between scaling strategies that all suffer from it.
Connection Draining Deregistration Delay, Graceful Shutdown	practice	Load Balancing	Allowing in-flight requests on an instance to complete before it is removed from service, rather than terminating them at cutover.
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.
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…
Failback	practice	Disaster Recovery	Returning to the primary region after a failover, including reconciling the data written while it was unavailable — the half of DR that is usually unplanned.
Infrastructure as Code IaC	practice	Cloud Architecture	Defining infrastructure in version-controlled declarative files that a tool reconciles against the real environment.
Infrastructure as Code in Practice IaC	practice	Infrastructure as Code	Defining infrastructure declaratively in version-controlled code so environments are reproducible, reviewable and auditable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Restore Drill	practice	Backup Strategies	A scheduled, timed exercise of restoring from backup into a clean environment — the only thing that converts a backup from a hope into a control.
Scheduled Capacity Predictive Provisioning, Calendar-Driven Scaling	practice	Autoscaling	Provisioning ahead of a known event rather than reacting to its traffic - the correct primary control for any spike whose rise time is shorter than an autoscaler's reaction time.
Storage Tiering Lifecycle Management, Hot-Warm-Cold Storage	practice	Cloud Storage	Placing objects in storage classes according to access probability, so cost tracks usage rather than volume.
Superseded-Work Cancellation Build Cancellation, Queue Deduplication	practice	Containers	Cancelling queued work that a later submission has made irrelevant - usually the largest single capacity saving available during a burst, and almost free to implement.
Tagging Strategy	practice	Cloud Governance	A defined, enforced set of metadata labels applied to every resource, without which cost allocation, ownership and lifecycle automation are all impossible.
Warm Standby	practice	Disaster Recovery	A continuously-replicated, scaled-down running copy of a system in a second location, ready to take traffic within minutes.
Well-Architected Review	practice	Cloud Architecture	A structured self-assessment of a workload against defined pillars — operational excellence, security, reliability, performance, cost, and sustainability.