Terminology

2225 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 areas2225 Architecture Fundamentals77 Distributed Systems107 Data Architecture110 Cloud Architecture94 Networking88 API & Integration Architecture82 Reliability & Resilience75 Observability70 Performance & Capacity Engineering72 Security Architecture86 Cost Architecture & FinOps71 Business Architecture67 Architecture Communication67 Enterprise Architecture66 Legacy Modernization71 AI-Era Architecture74 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 Architecture69 Streaming & Real-Time Data69 Data Governance & Semantics74 Frontend & Experience Architecture66 Edge, Mobile & IoT68 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture65 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk69

Kind Any concept801 practice736 pattern377 metric127 case-study77 tool62 protocol45

8 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Catch-Up Throttling Recovery Rate Limiting, Drain Control	practice	Streaming & Real-Time Data	Deliberately limiting how fast a recovered consumer drains its backlog, so that recovery does not become a second and larger incident.
Completeness Indicator As-Of Metadata, Result Confidence Marker	practice	Streaming SLOs	Metadata published alongside a streaming result stating how current it is and what proportion of expected input it reflects - so consumers can reason about staleness instead of assuming currency.
Late-Data Policy Lateness Handling, Allowed Lateness	practice	Watermarks & Late Data	The explicit decision about what happens to an event that arrives after its window has closed - drop it, route it aside, or update the emitted result.
Replay Effect Suppression Separating Computation From Effects, Safe Reprocessing	practice	Backfill & Reprocessing	Separating a stream processor's computation from the components that act on its output, so that reprocessing a month of data does not re-send a month of notifications.
Rollup Policy Pre-Aggregation Policy, Retention Tiering	practice	Real-Time Analytical Stores	The decision - made before ingestion, not after - about what granularity of data is retained for how long, and at what point raw events are collapsed into aggregates.
State Time-to-Live State TTL, State Expiry	practice	Stateful Stream Processing	An expiry policy on stream-processor state so that state size tracks the active key set rather than the accumulated history of everything the job has ever seen.
Streaming Schema Evolution	practice	Streaming Schema Evolution	Changing the shape of events in a topic that has multiple independently deployed producers and consumers, plus retained history that still has to be readable.
Streaming vs Batch Decision	practice	Streaming vs Batch	Choosing between continuous and periodic processing based on the decision latency the business actually requires, not on the appeal of real-time.