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Terminology

384 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 areas384 Architecture Fundamentals16 Distributed Systems73 Data Architecture71 Cloud Architecture17 Networking13 API & Integration Architecture17 Reliability & Resilience16 Observability14 Performance & Capacity Engineering13 Security Architecture18 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 concept136 practice90 pattern81 case-study26 protocol19 tool19 metric13

19 terms shown.

Term Kind Topic What it is
Credit-Based Flow Control protocol Backpressure & Flow Control A scheme where a receiver grants the sender a budget of bytes or messages it may transmit, replenished as the receiver consumes.
DNS Domain Name System protocol Networking The distributed directory that resolves names to addresses, and a surprisingly load-bearing part of most architectures.
GraphQL protocol API & Integration A query language and runtime where the client specifies exactly which fields it needs, against a typed schema, usually via a single endpoint.
gRPC protocol API & Integration A contract-first RPC framework using Protocol Buffers over HTTP/2, with generated clients and servers and first-class streaming.
JSON Web Token JWT protocol Security Architecture A signed, self-contained token carrying claims, which a service can validate locally without calling the issuer.
Model Context Protocol MCP protocol AI-Era Architecture An open protocol that standardises how AI applications connect to external tools, data sources and prompts.
OAuth 2.0 protocol Security Architecture An authorisation framework that lets an application obtain scoped, delegated access to a resource without handling the user's credentials.
Open Table Format Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, Apache Hudi protocol Data Lakes & Lakehouses A metadata layer over files in object storage that supplies ACID transactions, schema evolution and time travel — the thing that turns a data lake into a lakehouse.
OpenID Connect OIDC protocol Security Architecture An identity layer over OAuth 2.0 that adds a signed ID token asserting who the user is and how they authenticated.
Raft protocol Consensus Protocols A consensus algorithm designed to be understandable, decomposing agreement into leader election, log replication and safety.
Reactive Streams protocol Backpressure & Flow Control A specification for asynchronous stream processing in which the consumer requests a specific number of items, making backpressure part of the protocol rather than an afterthought.
Redlock protocol Distributed Locking An algorithm for distributed locking across independent Redis instances, and the subject of a well-known critique about what locks can guarantee at all.
REST RESTful API protocol API & Integration An architectural style for APIs built on resources identified by URLs, manipulated with uniform HTTP methods, and stateless requests.
TCP/IP protocol Networking The layered protocol suite underneath essentially all application traffic — IP routes packets, TCP turns them into a reliable ordered stream.
TLS Transport Layer Security, SSL protocol Networking The protocol that gives a network connection encryption, integrity and server authentication, underneath HTTPS and most other secure transports.
Two-Phase Commit 2PC, XA protocol Distributed Systems A blocking protocol for atomic commit across several resources: a coordinator asks all participants to prepare, then tells them all to commit or abort.
Two-Phase Locking 2PL protocol Transactions & Isolation The concurrency control protocol behind serializable isolation — acquire locks in a growing phase, release only in a shrinking phase, never interleaving the two.
WebSocket protocol Networking A protocol that upgrades an HTTP connection into a persistent, full-duplex channel so the server can push to the client without polling.
XA Transaction protocol Distributed Transactions The X/Open standard interface for two-phase commit across heterogeneous resource managers, still common in enterprise middleware and rarely the right choice for new services.