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
Application Performance Monitoring APM	tool	Observability	Instrumentation inside the application that attributes latency and errors to specific code paths, queries and dependencies.
Bloom Filter	tool	Data Architecture	A compact probabilistic structure that answers "is this key definitely absent, or possibly present?" — no false negatives, tunable false positives.
Content Delivery Network CDN	tool	Networking	A geographically distributed cache that serves content from a location near the user instead of from the origin.
Data Catalog	tool	Data Governance	A searchable inventory of datasets with their schema, owner, meaning, freshness, quality and classification.
Distributed Tracing	tool	Observability	Following one logical request across every service it touches by propagating a shared trace identifier and recording timed spans.
Document Store	tool	NoSQL Stores	A store that keeps semi-structured documents — typically JSON — retrievable by key and queryable by their contents.
Event Store	tool	Event Sourcing	An append-only store of domain events organised into per-entity streams, serving as the system of record rather than as a log beside it.
Event Stream	tool	Distributed Systems	An append-only, retained log of events that many independent consumers read at their own position, and can re-read.
Graph Database	tool	NoSQL Stores	A store whose first-class citizens are nodes and the relationships between them, making multi-hop traversal cheap.
Kubernetes K8s	tool	Cloud Architecture	A container orchestrator that continuously reconciles the running state of a cluster towards a declared desired state.
Message Queue	tool	Distributed Systems	A store that holds messages until a consumer processes them, decoupling producer availability and rate from consumer availability and rate.
NAT Gateway Network Address Translation	tool	Networking	A managed device that lets instances in a private subnet make outbound connections without being reachable inbound.
OpenAPI Swagger	tool	API & Integration	A machine-readable specification format for HTTP APIs, from which documentation, clients, servers, mocks and validation can be generated.
Prompt Registry Prompt Management	tool	AI-Era Architecture	A versioned store of production prompts with their model bindings, parameters and evaluation results, so a prompt change is a reviewable, traceable, reversible deployment.
Security Group Firewall Rules, NSG	tool	Networking	A stateful, instance-level firewall that allows specified traffic and denies everything else by default.
Service Mesh	tool	Architecture Patterns	An infrastructure layer of sidecar proxies that handles service-to-service networking — mTLS, retries, timeouts, routing, telemetry — outside the application.
Service Registry	tool	Service Discovery	The database of currently available service instances and their addresses, maintained by registration and pruned by health checking.
Vector Database	tool	AI-Era Architecture	A store optimised for approximate nearest-neighbour search over high-dimensional embeddings.
Wide-Column Store	tool	NoSQL Stores	A store organised as partitions of sorted rows, designed for very high write throughput and predictable single-partition reads at large scale.