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
Graceful Degradation in Practice pattern Graceful Degradation Deliberately reducing functionality to preserve the core when a dependency fails — a product decision expressed in architecture.
Graduated Escape Hatch Partial Opt-Out, Layered Override pattern Abstraction Level Choice The ability to override one component of a platform's abstraction without abandoning the rest - which prevents a single unmet requirement from causing total defection.
Grain Declaration practice Dimensional Modelling Stating exactly what one row of a fact table represents, before any column is chosen, because every later decision depends on it.
Graph Database tool NoSQL Stores A store whose first-class citizens are nodes and the relationships between them, making multi-hop traversal cheap.
GraphQL protocol API & Integration A query language and runtime where the client specifies exactly which fields it needs, against a typed schema, usually via a single endpoint.
GraphQL N+1 Problem DataLoader Pattern concept GraphQL The query explosion that occurs when each item in a list independently resolves its nested fields, turning one request into hundreds of database calls.
Gray Failure Partial Failure, Fail-Slow concept Failure Modes A component that is degraded rather than down, passing health checks while serving a portion of requests slowly or incorrectly.
Greenfield Velocity Illusion Rewrite Head Start, Front-Loaded Rewrite Progress concept Rebuild vs Re-architect The early speed advantage a from-scratch rebuild shows because it is running with all the real constraints switched off, which makes its estimate systematically wrong in the same direction every time.
Grey Failure Partial Failure, Fail-Slow concept Failure Modes A component that is degraded rather than down — slow, intermittently erroring, or failing for a subset of operations — which defeats health checks built for binary states.
gRPC protocol API & Integration A contract-first RPC framework using Protocol Buffers over HTTP/2, with generated clients and servers and first-class streaming.
gRPC API Design practice gRPC APIs Designing service interfaces in a schema-first binary protocol — where the discipline differs from REST and where the mistakes are permanent.
gRPC as a Transport protocol gRPC Transport A binary contract-first RPC protocol over HTTP/2 — efficient and strongly typed for internal service-to-service calls, awkward at the browser edge.
gRPC Status Codes concept gRPC APIs A fixed set of codes that classify failures and tell a client whether retrying is appropriate.
gRPC Streaming concept gRPC Transport Four call patterns — unary, server streaming, client streaming and bidirectional — built on HTTP/2 streams.
Guarantee Surface Promise Surface, Service Guarantee Footprint concept Product Thinking The set of customer-facing promises a product has made, each of which obliges the architecture to detect its own breach and pay for it - so this surface, not the feature count, drives a whole class of build cost.
Guardrail pattern Guardrails vs Gates A control that makes the unsafe action impossible or automatically corrected, rather than reviewing it before it happens.
Guardrail Availability Policy Fail-Open Guardrail Decision, Safety Check Degradation Policy practice Guardrails The decision, made in advance and per action class, about what the system does when a safety check cannot run - because the alternative is that a timeout in a classifier decides your safety posture at 03:00.
Guardrails pattern Guardrails Deterministic checks applied to model inputs and outputs, enforcing constraints that the model itself cannot be relied upon to respect.
Half-Open State concept Circuit Breakers The circuit breaker state that allows a limited number of trial requests through to test whether a failed dependency has recovered.
Handling Ambiguity practice Handling Ambiguity Making progress when the requirements are unclear, the stakeholders disagree, and waiting for clarity is not an option.
Handling Architectural Disagreement practice Handling Disagreement Resolving a technical dispute in a way that produces a decision people will actually implement, rather than a winner.
Happy Eyeballs Connection Racing, Dual-Stack Attempt Ordering protocol Networking Starting a second connection attempt on the other address family a few hundred milliseconds after the first, so a broken IPv6 or IPv4 path costs the user a short delay instead of a connection timeout.
Hardware Backed Credential concept Device Identity A private key generated inside a secure element and unable to leave it, so device identity cannot be copied off the device.
Hardware Security Module HSM tool Key Management A tamper-resistant device that generates and stores keys and performs cryptographic operations without the key material ever being extractable.
Harvest and Yield concept CAP & PACELC A refinement of CAP that treats availability as a continuum — yield is the fraction of requests answered, harvest is the fraction of data reflected in an answer.
Head-of-Line Blocking concept HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 & HTTP/3 One delayed item stalling everything queued behind it, even when the rest could have been processed - the failure mode that ordering guarantees create.
Health Check practice Observability An endpoint the platform polls to decide whether an instance should be restarted or should receive traffic — two different questions needing two different checks.
Health Check Configuration concept Layer 4 vs Layer 7 The interval, timeout, and healthy/unhealthy thresholds that together determine how quickly a failed backend leaves rotation.
Health Check Depth Shallow vs Deep Health Check, Dependency Health Check concept Failover How much of a service's dependency graph a health check consults, which determines whether the check reports an independent fault or a shared one that every instance will report at the same moment.
Health Check Semantics practice Health Checks The distinction between liveness, readiness and startup checks, and the failure each is intended to address.
Health Checks pattern Health Checks Endpoints that tell the platform whether to route traffic to an instance or restart it — and a well-documented way to amplify an outage.
Healthcare Data Protection concept Healthcare Data Protection Architecture for health information — where access must be broad enough for care, auditable in detail, and safe when the system is unavailable.
Hedged Request Request Hedging, Tied Request pattern Failure Modes Sending the same request to a second replica after a short delay and using whichever responds first, to cut tail latency caused by unlucky slow servers.
Hermetic Build practice Build Reproducibility A build whose output is a function only of its declared inputs, so the same commit cannot produce two different artifacts.
Hexagonal Architecture Ports and Adapters pattern Architecture Patterns Putting the domain at the centre and letting everything external — UI, database, queues — attach through ports implemented by replaceable adapters.
Hexagonal Architecture in Practice Ports and Adapters pattern Hexagonal Architecture The application defines ports; adapters implement them — so the same core is driven by HTTP, a queue, or a test with no changes.
Hidden Cost Categories concept Total Cost of Ownership The recurring costs routinely omitted from total-cost-of-ownership comparisons, which usually exceed the licence or infrastructure line everyone argues about.
Horizontal vs Vertical Scaling Scale Out vs Scale Up concept Performance & Capacity Adding more machines versus making one machine bigger — and the fact that vertical is underrated for stateful tiers.
Hot Key Hot Partition, Hot Row, Key Skew, Celebrity Problem concept Partitioning & Sharding A single key or narrow key range receiving a disproportionate share of traffic, so one partition saturates while the rest of the cluster is idle - the failure that no amount of horizontal scaling fixes.
Hot Key Hot Partition, Hot Shard concept Partitioning & Sharding A single key or partition receiving a disproportionate share of traffic, so that a well-balanced key space still produces one overloaded node.
Hot Partition Hot Shard, Hot Key concept Partitioning & Sharding One partition receiving disproportionate traffic, so the system saturates at a fraction of its aggregate capacity.
Hot, Warm and Cold Data concept Data Lifecycle & Retention Classifying data by how frequently and how urgently it is accessed, so each tier can be stored on media priced for that access pattern.
HTTP Method Semantics concept REST Design The safety, idempotency and cacheability guarantees each HTTP method carries, which clients and intermediaries rely on.
HTTP Protocol Versions HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, QUIC protocol HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 & HTTP/3 What each HTTP version changed, which problem it solved, and where the benefit actually shows up.
HTTP/2 Multiplexing protocol HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 & HTTP/3 Carrying many concurrent request/response streams over a single TCP connection, removing the need for multiple connections per origin.
Hub and Satellite pattern Data Vault Modelling Separating stable business keys from their changing attributes and from their relationships, so each can be loaded independently and kept forever.
Human in the Loop HITL pattern AI-Era Architecture Requiring human review or approval at a defined point in an automated flow, chosen by the reversibility and cost of the action.
Human in the Loop Design pattern Human-in-the-Loop Design Placing human judgement at the points where automation should not decide alone — with attention to whether the human can actually exercise judgement.
Human-in-the-Loop Design pattern Human in the Loop Placing human review at the points where model error is consequential, designed so the review is genuinely effective rather than nominal.
Hybrid Retrieval Dense + Sparse Retrieval, BM25 + Vector pattern RAG Architecture Running lexical keyword search and dense vector search together and fusing the results, because each fails where the other succeeds.
Hydration concept Hydration Cost The browser attaching interactivity to server-rendered HTML by re-running component logic, during which the page looks ready and is not.
Idempotency Idempotency Key, Exactly-Once Effect pattern Idempotency The property that performing an operation twice has the same effect as performing it once — the only practical defence against the duplicates a retrying client will inevitably send.
Idempotency concept Distributed Systems The property that performing an operation many times has the same effect as performing it once.
Idempotency Key pattern API & Integration A client-generated unique value sent with a request so the server can recognise a retry and return the original result instead of acting twice.
Idempotency Key pattern Idempotency Keys A client-generated identifier that lets a server recognise a retried request and return the original result instead of performing the action twice.
Idempotency Key Scoping Key Scope, Deduplication Scope practice Idempotency The decision of what an idempotency key is unique within, what is stored alongside it, and how long it lives - the three choices that determine whether deduplication actually works.
Idempotency Scope concept Idempotency Keys The boundary within which an idempotency key is unique and meaningful — per account, per endpoint, or global — and the retention window it lives for.
Idempotency Token Store pattern Idempotency The durable record of which idempotency keys have been seen and what each one returned, and the component that decides whether the guarantee is real.
Idempotent Consumer pattern Exactly-Once Semantics A message consumer whose effect is the same whether a message is processed once or many times, which is what makes at-least-once delivery safe.
Idempotent Pipeline practice ETL & ELT A pipeline whose task can be re-run for the same input window any number of times and produce the same result.