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Terminology

2205 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 areas2205 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 Architecture69 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 Architecture64 Streaming & Real-Time Data69 Data Governance & Semantics69 Frontend & Experience Architecture66 Edge, Mobile & IoT68 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture65 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk64
Kind Any concept794 practice734 pattern368 metric125 case-study77 tool62 protocol45

2205 terms shown.

Term Kind Topic What it is
Cross-Service Debugging practice Debugging Distributed Systems Investigating a failure that spans multiple services by moving between traces, logs, metrics and profiles along a single correlated request.
Cross-Zone Data Transfer concept Availability Zones Charges incurred when data moves between availability zones within a region — invisible on architecture diagrams and a recurring surprise on cloud bills.
Cross-Zone Load Balancing concept Load Balancing Whether a load balancer node distributes traffic to targets in all zones or only its own — a setting that affects both balance and data transfer cost.
Crypto-Shredding Cryptographic Erasure, Key Destruction Deletion, Per-Subject Encryption pattern Data Lifecycle & Retention Encrypting each data subject's personal data under a key unique to them, so that a deletion request is satisfied by destroying the key rather than by rewriting immutable or widely-replicated data.
Crypto-Shredding Cryptographic Erasure practice Data Lifecycle & Retention Making data permanently unreadable by destroying its encryption key, so immutable copies in backups and archives are erased without being modified.
Cumulative Layout Shift metric Core Web Vitals The extent to which visible content moves unexpectedly during load, which correlates with mis-taps and is almost entirely preventable by reserving space.
Cursor Opacity Opaque Continuation Token, Sealed Cursor pattern Pagination & Filtering Making a pagination cursor an untyped token the client cannot construct or interpret, so the server keeps the freedom to change what it encodes without breaking callers.
Cursor Pagination Keyset Pagination, Seek Pagination practice Pagination & Filtering Paginating by encoding a position in a stable sort order rather than by numeric offset - constant cost per page and correct under concurrent modification.
Cutover Abort Criteria Stop Conditions, Numeric No-Go Thresholds practice Migration Risk Numeric thresholds agreed before a cutover with one named person empowered to apply them, which replaces an improvised 03:00 judgement made by the people with the most sunk cost in continuing.
Cutover Planning practice Cutover Planning The plan for the moment of switching — including the decision points, the rollback, and the rehearsal that makes it survivable.
Cutover Runbook practice Cutover Planning The step-by-step plan for a migration event, including verification points, decision criteria and the rollback path, rehearsed before it is used.
DAG Dependency concept Batch Orchestration The declared edge stating that one task must not start until another has succeeded, and the difference between that and merely running later.
Dark Failover Shadow Failover, Non-Serving Failover Rehearsal practice DR Testing Bringing a standby environment to full serving readiness and exercising it with synthetic or internal traffic while production continues untouched, so recovery is measured without an outage being risked.
Dashboard Hierarchy practice Dashboards Organising dashboards into service-level, diagnostic and deep-dive layers so each answers a specific question at a specific moment.
Dashboards practice Dashboards Curated views built for a specific question — with the failure mode of showing everything and answering nothing.
Data Access Model concept Data Access Models The scheme by which permission to data is granted, whether by role, by attribute, by purpose, or by request with expiry.
Data Catalog tool Data Governance A searchable inventory of datasets with their schema, owner, meaning, freshness, quality and classification.
Data Catalogue tool Data Catalog A searchable inventory of data assets with their schemas, owners, lineage, quality signals and usage.
Data Clean Room pattern Data Sharing & Clean Rooms A controlled environment where two parties analyse their combined data without either gaining access to the other's raw records.
Data Contract Producer Contract, Schema Agreement, Published Interface pattern Data Contracts An explicit agreement between a data producer and its consumers covering schema, semantics, quality and change policy - which converts an implicit dependency on someone else's internal table into a managed int…
Data Contract pattern Data Contracts An explicit, versioned, enforceable agreement between a data producer and its consumers covering schema, semantics, quality and delivery.
Data Discovery practice Data Classification Automatically scanning stores to find where sensitive data actually resides, as distinct from where the documentation says it should.
Data Flow Diagrams practice Data-Flow Diagrams Where data goes, who holds it and which boundaries it crosses — the artefact that answers privacy, residency and threat-modelling questions.
Data Governance practice Data Governance Making data ownership, meaning, quality and access explicit — the mechanism that keeps a data platform trustworthy as it grows.
Data Gravity Data Inertia, Locality Pull, Egress Pull concept Network & Egress Costs The tendency of large data to attract compute and services toward it, because moving data across billed or slow boundaries is expensive while moving computation to the data is cheap.
Data Key Caching Key Reuse Window, Envelope Key Caching practice Key Management Reusing one generated data key across a bounded number of objects, bytes and seconds, so that envelope encryption does not make one key-service request per record.
Data Lakehouse concept Data Architecture A pattern that puts warehouse-style transactions, schema and governance on top of cheap open-format object storage.
Data Layout Partitioning and Clustering, File Organisation, Pruning Effectiveness concept Storage Layout & Partitioning How table data is physically organised into partitions and files, which determines how much can be skipped at query time - and is the dominant factor in analytical cost and performance, ahead of cluster size.
Data Lifecycle practice Data Lifecycle & Retention Managing data from creation through tiering to deletion — the discipline that keeps storage cost and legal exposure bounded.
Data Lineage practice Data Governance A record of where each dataset came from, what transformed it, and what depends on it — traced at table and ideally column level.
Data Lineage View concept Data-Flow Diagrams A view showing how data moves and is transformed through a system, independent of the components that do the moving.
Data Mesh concept Data Architecture An organisational approach that gives domain teams ownership of their analytical data as a product, with a self-serve platform and federated governance.
Data Mesh Federated Governance concept Data Governance & Semantics Central agreement on the rules that must be global, with domain autonomy over everything else.
Data Mesh in Practice concept Data Mesh Decentralising data ownership to the domains that produce it, with a self-serve platform and federated governance — an organisational change more than a technical one.
Data Migration Strategies practice Data Migration Strategies Moving data between systems with different models — where the difficulty is meaning and quality rather than transfer.
Data Minimisation concept Lawful Basis & Purpose Limitation Collecting and retaining only the personal data actually necessary for the stated purpose, treated as an architectural constraint rather than a policy statement.
Data Observability practice Data Observability Continuous automated monitoring of data health — freshness, volume, schema, distribution and lineage — designed to detect silent data failures.
Data Pipeline SLA Freshness SLA, Data SLO metric Data Platform Architecture A published commitment about when data will be available and how fresh it will be, turning a pipeline into something consumers can design against.
Data Plane Proxy Envoy, Sidecar Proxy concept Service Mesh Networking The per-workload proxy that actually carries mesh traffic, applying mTLS, retries, timeouts, routing and telemetry outside the application.
Data Platform Architecture Analytical Platform Architecture, Data Stack Architecture concept Data Platform Architecture The arrangement of ingestion, storage, transformation, serving and governance that decides whether analytical data arrives on time, means the same thing to everyone and costs a predictable amount.
Data Platform Tenancy concept Data Platform Tenancy How a shared data platform separates domains and customers across storage, compute, catalogue and access control.
Data Product Published Dataset, Owned Data Asset, Analytical Interface concept Data Products A dataset published deliberately as an interface with a named owner, documented semantics, quality guarantees and a change policy - as distinct from a table that consumers happen to be able to reach.
Data Product concept Data Products A curated, documented, owned dataset treated as a product with consumers, a service level and a lifecycle, rather than as the output of a pipeline.
Data Proximity Compute-Data Locality, Edge Distance Problem, Origin Pull concept Edge Rendering The observation that moving compute toward the user moves it away from the data, so edge execution helps only for computations that do not need a central round trip - and hurts for the ones people most want to…
Data Quality Dimensions concept Data Quality Dimensions The standard axes along which data quality is measured, which turn a vague complaint into a testable assertion.
Data Residency Data Localisation concept Data Residency A requirement that data be stored, and sometimes processed, within a specified geography.
Data Retention Policy practice Data Architecture A defined rule for how long each class of data is kept, where, and what happens at the end of it.
Data Steward concept Data Stewardship The named individual accountable for the definition, quality and appropriate use of a specific data domain.
Data Subject Access Request DSAR, SAR concept Data Subject Rights An individual's request for a copy of the personal data an organisation holds about them, which must be fulfilled completely within a statutory deadline.
Data Vault Modelling pattern Data Vault Modelling A modelling approach separating business keys, relationships and descriptive attributes into hubs, links and satellites, optimised for auditability and change absorption.
Data Virtualisation Query Federation, Logical Data Warehouse pattern Data Virtualisation Querying data where it lives across multiple systems through a single logical layer, without physically consolidating it.
Data Warehousing concept Data Warehousing A separate analytical store modelled for questions rather than transactions, physically isolated from the systems that generate the data.
Data-Flow Diagram DFD practice Architecture Communication A diagram of how data moves between processes, stores and external entities, with trust boundaries drawn on it.
Data-Plane Fail-Static Window Mesh Survival Window, Control-Plane Outage Headroom concept Service Mesh Operations How long a service mesh keeps carrying traffic after its control plane is gone, set by certificate lifetime and pod churn rather than by anything the mesh reports as healthy.
Data-Plane Upgrade Skew Proxy Version Skew Window, Mesh Upgrade Skew concept Service Mesh Operations The window during which a mesh runs proxies of more than one version alongside a control plane that supports only a bounded range of them, which is what makes every mesh upgrade a scheduled fleet restart rathe…
Database Index concept Data Architecture A secondary structure that lets the engine find rows without scanning, trading write cost and storage for read speed.
Database Migration practice Database Migration Moving data from one store to another while the system keeps running — where verification and reversibility matter more than the copy itself.
Database Migration Strategy practice Database Migration The approach for moving data to a new store, which is usually the longest pole and the highest risk in any modernisation.
Database per Service pattern Polyglot Persistence Each service owning its own datastore, with no other service reading or writing it directly.
Database Performance practice Database Performance The interventions that resolve database bottlenecks, in the order they should be attempted.