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

26 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Amortised Cost View Effective Rate Reporting, Commitment-Adjusted Showback	practice	Cost Allocation	Reporting each team's spend at the effective discounted rate spread across a commitment term, so a team's number moves only when its own usage moves rather than when the finance department buys something.
Architecture Cost Model	practice	Cost & FinOps	A calculation, made during design, of what an architecture will cost to run at expected and at peak volume.
Billable-Event Metering Contract-Aligned Metering, Obligation-Point Metering	practice	Licence & Vendor Costs	Recording the event a contract actually charges for at the point in the system where that obligation is created, rather than inferring it from delivery telemetry that caching and retries make unreliable.
Budget Guardrail	practice	Cost Governance	An automated control that constrains or alerts on spend before an invoice arrives, rather than reporting overspend after the fact.
Chargeback and Showback	practice	Cost & FinOps	Attributing cloud cost to the teams that generate it — either informationally (showback) or by moving it onto their budget (chargeback).
Compute Optimisation	practice	Compute Optimisation	Reducing compute spend through sizing, scheduling, purchasing model and architecture — in increasing order of both effort and payoff.
Cost Accountability Model	practice	Showback & Chargeback	The arrangement determining whether teams merely see their costs or are financially charged for them, and the behaviour each produces.
Cost Allocation	practice	Cost Allocation	Attributing spend to the team, service or customer that causes it — the prerequisite for every other cost conversation.
Cost Allocation Tagging	practice	Cost Allocation	A mandatory, enforced tagging scheme that attributes every resource to an owner, so spend can be understood and acted on below the level of the whole account.
Cost Attribution Tagging Strategy, Cost Ownership	practice	Cost Allocation	Assigning every unit of infrastructure spend to a team and a product, enforced at resource creation - the prerequisite without which no other cost control works.
Cost Governance	practice	Cost Governance	The guardrails, budgets and approval structures that prevent cost surprises without becoming a bottleneck.
Cost Model Sensitivity	practice	Architecture Cost Modelling	Identifying which assumptions in a cost projection dominate the outcome, so effort goes into the estimates that actually matter.
Egress Path Analysis	practice	Network & Egress Costs	Tracing where data physically moves in an architecture, because transfer charges follow paths that appear nowhere on the diagram.
FinOps	practice	Cost & FinOps	The practice of giving engineering teams visibility into and accountability for the cost of what they build and run.
FinOps Operating Phases	practice	FinOps Practice	The inform, optimise and operate cycle through which an organisation builds cost management into normal engineering practice.
FinOps Practice	practice	FinOps Practice	The operating model that makes cost a continuous engineering concern rather than a periodic finance exercise.
Instance Family Selection	practice	Compute Optimisation	Matching a workload's resource profile to a machine type designed for it, which is frequently a larger saving than reducing size.
Reserved and Committed Capacity Savings Plan, Committed Use Discount	practice	Reserved & Committed Capacity	Trading a commitment to spend for a substantial discount, where the risk is committing to an architecture you are about to change.
Rightsizing	practice	Rightsizing	Matching provisioned resources to measured need — the fastest large cost reduction available, and one that must respect headroom requirements.
Showback and Chargeback	practice	Showback & Chargeback	Showing teams their costs, or actually billing them — two different mechanisms with different incentive effects and different failure modes.
Spot Capacity Preemptible, Interruptible Instances	practice	Spot & Interruptible Capacity	Using a provider's spare capacity at a steep discount, in exchange for the provider being able to reclaim it at short notice.
Storage Lifecycle Policy	practice	Storage Costs	Automated rules that move objects between storage classes as they age, matching cost to the declining probability that data will be read.
Structural Cost Attribution Boundary-Based Allocation, Attribution Without Tagging	practice	Cost Allocation	Deriving cost ownership from deployment boundaries - account per workload, cluster per team - rather than from tags, because tagging discipline never survives contact with a growing organisation.
Trough-Based Commitment Baseline Reservation, Commit to the Floor	practice	Reserved & Committed Capacity	Sizing reserved capacity to the quietest period rather than the average, because only the trough is capacity you are certain to use for the whole commitment term.
Waste Elimination Zero-Reliability-Cost Reduction, Cloud Hygiene, Orphan Cleanup	practice	Waste Elimination	Removing spend that buys nothing - orphaned resources, oversized instances, idle environments, over-retention - which is typically a substantial fraction of an unmanaged estate and costs no reliability whatsoever.
Waste Elimination	practice	Waste Elimination	Removing spend that produces no value at all — the least controversial and most consistently available saving.