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

6 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.
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.
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.
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.