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

21 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Cache-Loss Survivability Cache Failure Blast Radius, Origin Protection	practice	Cache Invalidation	Designing so that losing the cache degrades the system rather than destroying it - because a cache absorbing most of the read traffic is a capacity dependency, not an optimisation.
Claim Provenance As-Of Metadata, Source-Tagged Data	practice	Data Architecture	Storing every externally sourced value with its timestamp, its source and a confidence derived from that source's history - so that downstream decisions about staleness are explicit rather than accidental.
Crypto-Shredding Cryptographic Erasure	practice	Data Lifecycle & Retention	Making data permanently unreadable by destroying its encryption key, so immutable copies in backups and archives are erased without being modified.
Data Governance	practice	Data Governance	Making data ownership, meaning, quality and access explicit — the mechanism that keeps a data platform trustworthy as it grows.
Data Lifecycle	practice	Data Lifecycle & Retention	Managing data from creation through tiering to deletion — the discipline that keeps storage cost and legal exposure bounded.
Data Lineage	practice	Data Governance	A record of where each dataset came from, what transformed it, and what depends on it — traced at table and ideally column level.
Data Retention Policy	practice	Data Architecture	A defined rule for how long each class of data is kept, where, and what happens at the end of it.
Denormalisation	practice	Data Architecture	Deliberately duplicating data across records to make reads cheap, accepting the write-time cost of keeping copies in step.
ETL and ELT	practice	ETL & ELT	Whether to transform before loading or after — a choice that follows from where compute is cheap and who owns the transformation.
Expand and Contract Migration Parallel Change, Expand-Migrate-Contract	practice	Data Governance	Changing a schema through a sequence of individually backward-compatible steps, so old and new application versions can run simultaneously.
Idempotent Pipeline	practice	ETL & ELT	A pipeline whose task can be re-run for the same input window any number of times and produce the same result.
Indexing Strategy	practice	Data Architecture	Choosing the set of indexes a table carries by working backwards from its actual queries, and accepting the write cost that each one adds.
Materialised Read Model Projection, Read Model	practice	CQRS	A precomputed, query-shaped copy of data maintained asynchronously from the system of record - and the operational obligations that come with it.
Normalisation Normal Forms	practice	Relational Modelling	Organising a schema so each fact is stored exactly once, removing the update anomalies that duplication creates.
Pipeline Orchestration	practice	ETL & ELT	Coordinating the execution of data tasks by dependency rather than by clock, with retries, backfill and observability built in.
Query Optimisation	practice	Query Optimisation	Making the database do less work — usually by removing round trips and rows rather than by rewriting clever SQL.
Relational Modelling	practice	Relational Modelling	Designing a schema around entities, relationships and enforced constraints — still the correct default for most transactional systems.
Replica Lag Routing Read Routing, Primary Pinning	practice	Replication	Deciding, per read, whether it may be served by an asynchronous replica - the operational discipline that makes read scaling safe.
Request Coalescing Request Collapsing, Single-Flight	practice	Caching Strategies	Collapsing many concurrent requests for the same missing resource into a single upstream fetch, with the rest waiting on its result.
Shard Key Partition Key	practice	Partitioning & Sharding	The attribute deciding which partition a row belongs to - the single most consequential and least reversible choice in a partitioned data architecture.
Write-Amplification Audit Index Cost Review, Write Path Accounting	practice	Query Optimisation	Accounting for everything a single logical write actually costs - indexes, replication, triggers, deletion of old rows - before concluding that a database needs more capacity.