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

8 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Burn Rate Alerting	practice	SLO Monitoring	Paging when the error budget is being consumed fast enough to matter, rather than when a component crosses a threshold.
Correlation ID	practice	Observability	A single identifier attached to one logical operation and included in every log line it produces, anywhere in the system.
Health Check	practice	Observability	An endpoint the platform polls to decide whether an instance should be restarted or should receive traffic — two different questions needing two different checks.
RED Method	practice	Observability	A minimal per-service dashboard: Rate, Errors, Duration — the request-centric view of whether users are being served.
Runbook Playbook	practice	Observability	A short, actionable document telling an on-call engineer what an alert means, what to check, and what the safe mitigations are.
Structured Logging	practice	Observability	Emitting log entries as machine-parseable key-value records rather than as formatted prose.
Telemetry Sampling	practice	Observability	Keeping a subset of traces or events to bound observability cost, chosen so the ones that matter survive.
USE Method	practice	Observability	For every resource, track Utilisation, Saturation and Errors — the resource-centric complement to request-centric monitoring.