Terminology

454 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 areas454 Architecture Fundamentals16 Distributed Systems73 Data Architecture71 Cloud Architecture55 Networking13 API & Integration Architecture17 Reliability & Resilience16 Observability14 Performance & Capacity Engineering13 Security Architecture50 Cost Architecture & FinOps12 Business Architecture9 Architecture Communication8 Enterprise Architecture8 Legacy Modernization11 AI-Era Architecture15 Software Architecture & Engineering19 Architecture Patterns15 Architecture Decision-Making11 The Architect's Meta-Skills8

Kind Any concept166 practice107 pattern93 case-study26 tool26 protocol22 metric14

14 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 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 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.
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.
Landing Zone	practice	Cloud Architecture	A pre-configured, governed cloud environment — accounts, networking, identity, logging, guardrails — into which workloads can be deployed safely.
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.
Policy as Code	practice	Cloud Governance	Expressing governance rules as executable code evaluated automatically, so compliance is prevented at creation rather than reported after the fact.
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.
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.
Well-Architected Review	practice	Cloud Architecture	A structured self-assessment of a workload against defined pillars — operational excellence, security, reliability, performance, cost, and sustainability.