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

33 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Aspirational and Achievable SLO	practice	SLI, SLO & SLA	The distinction between the reliability a team wishes for and the reliability its current architecture and dependencies can actually deliver.
Blameless Postmortem Learning Review, Incident Retrospective, Non-Attributive Analysis	practice	Postmortems	An incident analysis structured so that participants can disclose what actually happened without personal risk - which is a technical requirement for accurate information, not a cultural courtesy.
Blameless Postmortem	practice	Reliability & Resilience	An incident review that seeks the systemic conditions that made a failure possible, explicitly excluding individual fault.
Blast Radius Analysis	practice	Fault Isolation	Determining, for each component, exactly what fails and who is affected when it fails completely.
Blast Radius Staging Graduated Rollout, Progressive Shedding	practice	Failover	Applying a change or a traffic shift in increasing increments gated on health, so that a wrong decision affects a bounded population before it affects everyone.
Capacity Planning	practice	Reliability & Resilience	Deciding in advance how much capacity will be needed, given growth, seasonality and failure scenarios, and ensuring it can be there in time.
Chaos Engineering	practice	Reliability & Resilience	Deliberately injecting failure into a system to discover, before an incident does, which of your resilience assumptions are false.
Chaos Engineering in Practice	practice	Chaos Engineering	Deliberately injecting failure into production to verify that resilience mechanisms work — an experiment with a hypothesis, not vandalism.
Contributing Factors Analysis	practice	Postmortems	Identifying the multiple conditions that combined to produce an incident, in place of searching for a single root cause.
Dark Failover Shadow Failover, Non-Serving Failover Rehearsal	practice	DR Testing	Bringing a standby environment to full serving readiness and exercising it with synthetic or internal traffic while production continues untouched, so recovery is measured without an outage being risked.
Degradation Ladder Kill Switch List, Feature Shedding Order, Brownout Plan	practice	Degradation Modes	An ordered, pre-agreed list of features that can be disabled under stress, each with a switch that works without deployment, a named owner, a trigger condition and a rehearsed fallback.
Disaster Recovery DR	practice	Reliability & Resilience	The plan and capability for restoring service after an event that takes out a whole site, region or system.
Error Budget Reliability Budget, SLO Budget, Failure Allowance	practice	Error Budgets	The permitted amount of unreliability implied by an SLO, used as an automatic arbiter between shipping features and improving reliability - and, when unspent, as evidence that the system is more reliable than …
Error Budget Policy	practice	Error Budgets	The pre-agreed consequences of exhausting an error budget, which is what turns an SLO from a metric into a decision-making mechanism.
Failure Injection Testing	practice	Resilience Testing	Deliberately introducing faults into a system under test to verify that timeouts, retries, fallbacks and circuit breakers behave as designed.
Fallback Independence	practice	Graceful Degradation	The requirement that a degraded path fail independently of the primary - and be exercised continuously, because fallbacks that are never run do not work.
Feature Criticality Tiering	practice	Graceful Degradation	Classifying product functionality by whether it must work, should work, or can be dropped, so degradation decisions are made in advance by the business.
Game Day	practice	Reliability & Resilience	A scheduled exercise in which a failure is deliberately introduced and the team responds as though it were real, to test the system and the response together.
Game Days	practice	Game Days	Scheduled exercises where a team responds to a simulated or injected failure, testing the humans and the process as much as the system.
Incident Command Incident Command System, ICS	practice	Reliability & Resilience	Assigning explicit roles during an incident — commander, operations lead, communications lead, scribe — so coordination does not compete with diagnosis.
Incident Severity Levels	practice	Incident Management	A small, agreed scale of incident severity that determines response, escalation and communication without requiring debate during the event.
Journey-Level SLO Per-Journey Availability, User-Facing SLI	practice	SLI, SLO & SLA	Setting reliability targets per user journey rather than per platform or per service, because consequence differs by journey and only a journey-level measurement reflects what a user experienced.
Load-Coupled Fault Injection Fault Injection Under Load, Contention Testing	practice	Chaos Engineering	Injecting dependency faults while the system is at realistic peak load, because timeouts, pool sizes and breaker thresholds only reveal whether they are correct under contention.
On-Call	practice	On-Call	The rotation that responds to production problems — a system whose health is measured by whether the people in it can sustain being in it.
Postmortems Incident Review, Blameless Postmortem	practice	Postmortems	Structured learning from an incident, conducted so that the truth is obtainable — which requires that telling it is safe.
Resilience Testing	practice	Resilience Testing	Verifying that failure-handling behaves as designed — a category of testing distinct from functional and load testing, and usually absent.
Restore Verification	practice	DR Testing	Periodically performing a real restore from backup and validating the result, as the only evidence that a recovery capability exists.
Runbook Quality	practice	Incident Management	The properties that make an operational procedure usable by a tired responder under pressure, as opposed to a document that merely exists.
Severity Levels SEV Levels	practice	Reliability & Resilience	A predefined scale of incident impact that determines who is woken, how fast, and what process applies.
Shared-Cause Analysis What Is Shared, Redundancy Audit	practice	Redundancy	Auditing a redundant design by asking what every replica has in common, because redundancy protects against independent failure and not against anything shared by all copies.
Sustainable On-Call	practice	On-Call	An on-call arrangement whose alert volume, rotation size and compensation allow it to continue indefinitely without degrading the people in it.
Tabletop Exercise	practice	Game Days	A discussion-based walkthrough of a hypothetical incident that tests procedures and decision-making without touching any system.
User Journey SLO Critical User Journey, CUJ	practice	SLI, SLO & SLA	Defining reliability targets around what a user is trying to accomplish, measured where the user is, rather than around per-request success rates at the server.