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
Artifact Signing	practice	Supply Chain Security	Cryptographically signing build outputs so that deployment can verify what is being run was produced by the expected pipeline from the expected source.
Compliance Framework SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS	practice	Security Architecture	A published set of control requirements an organisation is assessed against, which turns security posture into evidence somebody else will check.
Consent Management	practice	Privacy Engineering	Capturing, storing, honouring and evidencing a data subject's permissions for specific processing purposes, including withdrawal.
Continuous Compliance	practice	Compliance Frameworks	Producing compliance evidence automatically and continuously from the systems themselves, rather than reconstructing it before an audit.
Data Discovery	practice	Data Classification	Automatically scanning stores to find where sensitive data actually resides, as distinct from where the documentation says it should.
Egress Filtering	practice	Network Security	Restricting which destinations a workload may connect to outbound — the control that limits data exfiltration and SSRF impact, and the one most often omitted.
Encryption at Rest and in Transit	practice	Security Architecture	Protecting stored data from disclosure if the medium is obtained, and network data from disclosure if the path is observed — two different controls against two different threats.
Key Rotation	practice	Key Management	Periodically replacing a cryptographic key with a new one while retaining the old for decrypting existing data, so exposure from any single key is bounded.
Multi-Factor Authentication MFA, 2FA	practice	Authentication	Requiring evidence from more than one category — something you know, have, or are — so a single stolen credential is insufficient.
OWASP Top Ten	practice	Security Architecture	A periodically updated consensus list of the most critical web application security risks, useful as a design-review checklist.
Privacy by Design	practice	Security Architecture	Building privacy protections into a system's structure from the start, rather than adding controls to a design that already collects and keeps everything.
Secrets Management	practice	Security Architecture	Storing, distributing, rotating and auditing credentials so that they never live in code, images or configuration files.
STRIDE	practice	Threat Modelling	A mnemonic for six threat categories — spoofing, tampering, repudiation, information disclosure, denial of service, elevation of privilege — walked across each component and data flow.
Threat Modelling	practice	Security Architecture	A structured exercise that identifies what can go wrong with a design, before it is built, by walking the system's trust boundaries.