Terminology

791 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 areas791 Architecture Fundamentals38 Distributed Systems73 Data Architecture71 Cloud Architecture55 Networking51 API & Integration Architecture45 Reliability & Resilience40 Observability33 Performance & Capacity Engineering34 Security Architecture50 Cost Architecture & FinOps30 Business Architecture28 Architecture Communication27 Enterprise Architecture27 Legacy Modernization27 AI-Era Architecture34 Software Architecture & Engineering37 Architecture Patterns34 Architecture Decision-Making30 The Architect's Meta-Skills27

Kind Any concept292 practice240 pattern133 metric36 protocol32 tool32 case-study26

791 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Workload Identity Service Identity, Federated Identity	pattern	Identity & Access Management	Giving a running workload a cryptographically verifiable identity issued by the platform, so it obtains short-lived credentials without a stored secret.
Workload Model	practice	Load Testing	A description of the traffic mix, arrival pattern and data distribution a load test reproduces, which determines whether the test's results mean anything.
Write Skew	concept	Transactions & Isolation	An anomaly where two transactions each read a set of rows, make disjoint writes based on what they read, and together violate an invariant neither could have broken alone.
Write-Ahead Log WAL, Commit Log	concept	Data Architecture	Recording every change to a durable sequential log before applying it, so that a crash can be recovered by replaying the log.
X-Forwarded-For Forwarded Header	concept	Reverse Proxies	The header chain recording original client addresses through a series of proxies — and a value that must never be trusted without knowing the topology.
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.
Zero Trust	concept	Security Architecture	A security model that grants no implicit trust from network position, and authenticates and authorises every request individually.
Zero-Downtime Cutover	pattern	Zero-Downtime Migration	Moving traffic to a new system without an outage, using replication, dual running and progressive traffic shift.
Zero-Downtime Migration Expand and Contract, Parallel Change	pattern	Legacy Modernization	Changing a schema or system while it stays in service, by adding the new alongside the old, migrating, then removing the old.
Zonal vs Regional Services	concept	Availability Zones	Whether a cloud resource lives in one availability zone or is inherently spread across several — a property that determines what a zone failure takes with it.
Zoom's Pandemic Scale-Up	case-study	Cloud Architecture	Zoom grew from around 10 million to over 300 million daily meeting participants in roughly three months, absorbed by a hybrid architecture and a distributed media routing design.