Portfolio ↗

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
Flag Propagation Time Flag Convergence Time, Kill Switch Latency metric Client Feature Flags The worst-case delay between changing a feature flag and every client acting on the new value - the number that determines whether a flag can be used as a safety control or only as a release convenience.
Flake Budget Flakiness Threshold, Quarantine Policy practice Flaky Test Management A hard limit on test flakiness, enforced by automatic detection and quarantine with a deletion deadline - because above a small rate the suite stops being a signal and starts training the team to ignore failures.
Flake Rate Test Nondeterminism, Suite Trust Threshold, Intermittent Failure Rate concept Flaky Test Management The proportion of test failures that are not caused by a real defect - a quantity with a sharp threshold, above which the suite stops being a signal and starts training the team to ignore failures.
Flaky Test concept Flaky Test Management A test that passes and fails on unchanged code, destroying the signal value of the entire suite it belongs to.
Flame Graph tool Profiling & Optimisation A visualisation of sampled stack traces in which width represents time spent, used to identify where a program's execution actually goes.
Fleet Management practice Fleet Management Operating a large population of physical devices — knowing what is deployed, where, on which version, in what health, and acting on that at scale.
Fleet Reconnection Storm Device Thundering Herd, Synchronised Reconnect, IoT Recovery Surge concept Device Telemetry at Scale A synchronised burst of devices re-establishing connections after any disruption, which is far more expensive than steady-state traffic and routinely turns a brief platform blip into a prolonged outage.
Fleet-Wide Change Reach Platform Change Propagation concept Service Templates How long it takes a platform change to reach the majority of the services built on it - the measure of whether a platform can actually change anything.
Flow Efficiency Work-to-Wait Ratio, Process Cycle Efficiency concept Value Streams The proportion of elapsed lead time in which work is actively being done - typically very low, which is why optimising engineering throughput addresses the minority of the problem.
Flow Logs tool Network Troubleshooting Records of accepted and rejected network connections, giving a queryable history of what actually talked to what.
Focus Management practice Accessibility Architecture Deliberately controlling where keyboard focus sits after an interface change, which is what makes a dynamic application usable without a mouse.
Follower Fetching Closest-Replica Fetch, Rack-Aware Consumption pattern Streaming Cost Letting a consumer read from the in-sync replica in its own availability zone instead of from the partition leader, which removes consumer-side cross-zone transfer charges and adds replication delay to every read.
Forced Upgrade practice Mobile Release Strategy Blocking an installed client version from operating until it updates, which is the only lever available and is disruptive enough to need a policy.
Foreign Key Constraint concept Relational Modelling A database-enforced rule that a referencing value must exist in the referenced table — referential integrity that no application bug can violate.
Fork-Triggered Build Privileged Trigger, Pwn Request concept Pipeline Secrets A continuous-integration trigger that runs a workflow in the base repository's privileged context while its inputs come from an outside contributor - so the pipeline executes attacker-authored code with its ow…
Forward Fix Roll Forward, Fix Forward practice Rollback & Forward Fix Recovering from a bad release by shipping a corrective change rather than reverting to the previous version.
Fourth Party Risk concept Third-Party Risk The dependencies of your dependencies, which you did not choose, may not know about, and remain accountable for.
Fragmentation Cost Bin-Packing Loss, Scheduling Fragmentation concept Compute Models The capacity that exists in aggregate but cannot be used because it is scattered across nodes in pieces too small for the jobs that need it - the dominant inefficiency in indivisible-resource scheduling.
Freshness Requirement concept Streaming vs Batch How stale data may be before the decision it supports degrades — the only question that justifies streaming over batch.
Freshness Tiering Hot Index, Recent-Document Tier pattern Indexing Splitting a search corpus into a small aggressively-refreshed index of recent documents and a large lazily-refreshed main index, so sub-second freshness is paid for only on the documents that need it.
Friction Budget concept Security vs Usability The limited amount of security friction users will absorb before they work around it, making usability a security property rather than its opponent.
Frontend Architecture concept Frontend & Experience Architecture The structural decisions in client applications — rendering strategy, state ownership, boundaries and delivery — which have the same character as backend ones and are frequently made by default.
Frontend Security Boundary concept Frontend Security The rule that nothing enforced in the browser is a security control, and the browser-side mechanisms that reduce blast radius anyway.
Fully-Loaded Comparison Total Cost Comparison, People-Inclusive TCO, Loaded Build-vs-Buy practice Managed vs Self-Managed Comparing options with engineering time, operational burden and opportunity cost included rather than infrastructure and licence prices alone - which usually reverses the apparent answer at small and medium scale.
Fully-Loaded Tenant Cost True Cost to Serve, Cost Per Tenant, Loaded Unit Cost concept Unit Economics The total cost of serving one tenant including the per-tenant floors that do not scale with usage - infrastructure minimums, control-plane overhead, fleet operations, support and abuse - which is what makes sm…
Functional Cohesion concept Cohesion The strongest form of cohesion, in which every element of a module contributes to a single well-defined task.
Functional Equivalence Switching Equivalence, Same-Service-Type Equivalence concept Sector Cloud Rules The standard that a destination service must deliver the same output at the same performance and security after a switch, which is defined only between services of the same type and therefore does not rescue a…
Functional vs Non-Functional Behaviour vs Quality of Behaviour concept Functional vs Non-Functional Functional requirements say what the system does; non-functional requirements say how well, and only the second constrains structure.
Fundable Boundary Budget-Aligned Boundary, Ownable Boundary concept Operating Models A service boundary that sits inside one budget line and one approver - the condition under which it survives contact with the organisation rather than being re-crossed by the first urgent change.
Funnel-Stage Cost Ratio Attempts per Conversion Cost, Pre-Conversion Cost Multiple metric Unit Economics The cost incurred by all the attempts that precede one revenue event, expressed per revenue event, which exposes the case where making each attempt cheaper makes the business more expensive.
Game Day practice Reliability & Resilience A scheduled exercise in which a failure is deliberately introduced and the team responds as though it were real, to test the system and the response together.
Game Days practice Game Days Scheduled exercises where a team responds to a simulated or injected failure, testing the humans and the process as much as the system.
Gang Scheduling Co-scheduling, All-or-Nothing Allocation concept Compute Models Allocating every resource a job needs simultaneously or not at all, so tightly-coupled distributed work cannot deadlock holding a partial allocation.
Gateway Aggregation pattern API Gateway Combining several backend calls into one client-facing response at the gateway, reducing client round trips at the cost of coupling the gateway to backend structure.
Gateway Offloading pattern API Gateways Moving cross-cutting concerns — TLS termination, authentication, rate limiting, compression, logging — from every service into the gateway.
Gateway Timeout Chain concept API Gateways The sequence of timeouts from client through load balancer, gateway and service, which must decrease inward or produce confusing failures.
Geo-Blocking Accuracy concept Geo-Restriction & Sanctions The reliability of determining a user's jurisdiction from network signals, which is imperfect in both directions and therefore needs a designed handling of errors.
Geo-Restriction and Sanctions practice Geo-Restriction & Sanctions Preventing prohibited access and transactions by location or party — where the control must be enforced, evidenced and current.
GitHub 2018: 43 Seconds of Partition, 24 Hours of Recovery GitHub October 2018 Incident case-study Leader Election A 43-second network partition triggered an automated cross-region database failover, and reconciling the resulting divergence took over 24 hours.
GitOps practice GitOps Declaring desired infrastructure state in version control and letting an in-cluster agent continuously reconcile reality to it.
Global Map Serving: Precomputed Tiles at Planet Scale Map Tiles, Tile Pyramid case-study Content Delivery Networks Rendering a map view on demand is impossible at global scale, so the world is precomputed into a pyramid of cacheable tiles addressed by coordinate and zoom.
Global Traffic Management GSLB, Global Load Balancing tool Multi-Region Architecture The layer that decides which region a given user reaches, using DNS, anycast or an edge network, and that performs regional failover.
Glossary Term Half-Life Definition Decay Rate, Term Attestation Age metric Business Glossary The time after which half a glossary's definitions no longer match the SQL that implements them, measured by sampling rather than assumed, and used to set the review budget a glossary can actually afford.
Golden Path Paved Road, Service Template, Supported Path pattern Paved Roads A generated, fully-configured starting point for a new service that arrives with observability, pipeline, identity, ownership and cost attribution already in place - making the compliant path the fastest one r…
Golden Path Paved Road, Paved Path practice Paved Road & Golden Path The supported, documented, pre-integrated way to do a common task, made easier than any alternative rather than mandatory.
Golden Path Adoption metric Paved Roads The proportion of teams voluntarily using the supported path, which is the honest measure of whether a platform is solving real problems.
Golden Record concept Master Data Management The single authoritative version of an entity assembled from conflicting sources, and the survivorship rules that decide which value wins.
Golden Signals metric Observability The four measurements that cover most of what matters for a request-driven service: latency, traffic, errors and saturation.
Good Enough Architecture concept Pragmatism Designing to what the situation actually requires rather than to what would be ideal, on the basis that unnecessary sophistication carries permanent cost.
Goodput Useful Throughput metric Throughput The rate of completed work that someone is still waiting for, which diverges from throughput under overload and is the only rate that tracks what users receive.
Google Borg to Kubernetes: Learning From an Internal System Borg, Omega case-study Containers Kubernetes was designed with a decade of Borg experience behind it, and its authors have been explicit about which Borg decisions they deliberately did not repeat.
Google Maps and Planetary-Scale Spatial Serving case-study Performance & Capacity Map serving is fast because almost nothing is computed on request — the world is precomputed into a pyramid of tiles, and space is indexed onto a one-dimensional curve.
Google Spanner: Buying Consistency With Time TrueTime, External Consistency case-study Distributed Transactions Spanner achieves globally consistent transactions by bounding clock uncertainty with dedicated hardware and deliberately waiting out that uncertainty on commit.
Google SRE: Error Budgets as a Negotiation Device SRE Error Budget case-study Error Budgets Google resolved the standing conflict between shipping speed and reliability by giving both sides a shared number and a pre-agreed consequence.
Governance Operating Model concept Architecture Governance The arrangement of decision rights, review points and automated controls through which architectural intent is maintained across an organisation.
Governed Exception Waiver, Standards Exception practice Technology Standards A deliberate, scoped, time-limited departure from a standard, recorded with an owner - which is always better than the ungoverned workaround it prevents.
Governed Metric Set The Twenty Numbers, Governance Boundary practice Self-Service vs Governed The deliberately small collection of metrics defined once with an owner, with everything else left explicitly self-service - because governing all analysis becomes a bottleneck and is abandoned.
Governed Path Bypass Shadow Access Route, Route-Around concept Self-Service vs Governed Any route to data that reaches it without passing the controls the organisation believes are in force, which is what makes a correct policy optional rather than binding.
Governed Self-Service concept Self-Service vs Governed Letting anyone analyse anything while constraining what may be treated as authoritative, which resolves the apparent conflict between speed and consistency.
Graceful Degradation practice Distributed Systems Continuing to deliver reduced but useful function when a dependency fails, instead of failing the whole request.