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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
Idempotent Sink pattern Exactly-Once Semantics A destination where writing the same record twice has the same effect as writing it once, which is what makes end-to-end exactly-once achievable at all.
Identifier Reuse Hazard Code Recycling, Key Reassignment concept Reference Data The silent corruption that occurs when a retired code or key is later assigned to a different real-world entity, so historical facts join to the wrong meaning with no error anywhere.
Identity and Access Management IAM concept Security Architecture The system of record for principals, credentials and permissions, and the policy engine that decides what each principal may do.
Identity-Record Separation Pseudonymous Subject Reference, Retention-Erasure Split pattern Data Lifecycle & Retention Holding regulated business records under a pseudonymous reference and the reference-to-person mapping in a separate governed store, so a retention obligation and an erasure right can both be satisfied.
Idle Connection Race Keep-Alive Race, Idle Pool Reset concept HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 & HTTP/3 The unavoidable window where a server closes a pooled connection just as a client sends a request on it, producing a small error floor that is worst when traffic is lightest.
Idle Cost concept Cost per Request The portion of infrastructure spend incurred regardless of traffic, which determines how cost per request behaves as volume changes.
Idle Source Stall Watermark Stall, Silent Pipeline Halt, Quiet Partition Problem concept Streaming SLOs A stream processor whose event-time progress halts because one partition or source has stopped producing - so output ceases entirely while every component reports healthy.
Image Pull Amplification Per-Node Image Cost, Cold Node Pull Cost concept Container Image Strategy The property that a container image's size is paid on every node that has never seen that version, so its real cost scales with node churn and scale-out events rather than with release frequency.
Image Registry tool Containers The store from which container images are pulled, and an under-appreciated availability and security dependency of every deployment and every autoscale event.
Immutable Backup Object Lock, WORM pattern Backup Strategies A backup that cannot be modified or deleted for a defined retention period, even by an administrator — the control that makes backups survive ransomware and insider error.
Immutable Store Erasure Conflict concept Erasure vs Immutability The direct contradiction between architectures designed never to forget and obligations requiring data to be removed, which must be resolved in the design rather than in policy.
In-Country Processing concept Data Residency Keeping data within a jurisdiction across every path it takes — including backups, logs, telemetry, support access and the disaster recovery region.
In-Memory Reservation Service Inventory Reservation Service, Single-Owner Counter, Memory-Speed Allocation pattern Database Performance Moving a heavily-contended counter or inventory pool into a single-owner in-memory service that serialises decisions at memory speed and persists asynchronously, trading a small durability window for orders of…
Incident Command Incident Command System, ICS practice Reliability & Resilience Assigning explicit roles during an incident — commander, operations lead, communications lead, scribe — so coordination does not compete with diagnosis.
Incident Severity Levels practice Incident Management A small, agreed scale of incident severity that determines response, escalation and communication without requiring debate during the event.
Independent Assurance concept Three Lines Model Assessment by a function with no involvement in designing or operating the control, which is what makes the assessment worth anything.
Independent Deployability concept Microservices The property that a service can be released to production without coordinated release of any other, which is the defining benefit of microservices.
Index Selectivity metric Indexing The fraction of rows a predicate eliminates — the property that determines whether an index is worth using at all.
Index Write Amplification Index Maintenance Cost, Secondary Index Overhead concept Database Performance The multiplication of write work caused by secondary indexes, where every insert and every update to an indexed column must also maintain each index tree inside the same transaction.
Indexing concept Indexing Auxiliary structures that turn a scan into a lookup — the highest-leverage database intervention and the one most often applied blindly.
Indexing Strategy practice Data Architecture Choosing the set of indexes a table carries by working backwards from its actual queries, and accepting the write cost that each one adds.
Indirect Prompt Injection concept Prompt Injection Defence An attack in which malicious instructions are placed in content the model will later retrieve, rather than typed by the user.
Inference Cost per Interaction metric AI Cost Management The fully loaded token cost of one user interaction, including retrieval, retries, guardrails and agent loops, measured rather than estimated.
Inference Request Path concept LLM Application Architecture The sequence of stages an LLM application request passes through, each with distinct latency, cost and failure characteristics.
Inference Telemetry practice AI Observability Recording the full context of each model interaction — inputs, outputs, tokens, latency, model version and evaluation scores — so quality and cost can be investigated.
Influence Without Authority practice Influence Without Authority Getting decisions made and adopted by people who do not report to you — which is most of the architect's job.
Information Hiding concept Modularity Designing module boundaries around the decisions most likely to change, so that a change is contained within one module.
Infrastructure as Code IaC practice Cloud Architecture Defining infrastructure in version-controlled declarative files that a tool reconciles against the real environment.
Infrastructure as Code in Practice IaC practice Infrastructure as Code Defining infrastructure declaratively in version-controlled code so environments are reproducible, reviewable and auditable.
Infrastructure State Partition State Splitting, Per-Domain State practice IaC Modules & Drift Splitting one infrastructure state file into several along ownership and lifecycle boundaries, so plans are fast and a mistaken apply cannot reach unrelated resources.
Ingest Fan-In concept IoT Ingest Architecture The shape of a system receiving many small messages from very many senders, where connection count rather than data volume is the primary constraint.
Ingestion Pattern concept Ingestion Patterns The mechanism by which data leaves a source system, which determines freshness, source load and how faithfully change is captured.
Ingestion-Query Isolation Write-Read Workload Separation, Analytics Isolation pattern Observability Separating a continuous high-volume write path from a spiky, arbitrary query path so that an expensive query cannot stall ingestion - because a query delay is recoverable and an ingestion gap is not.
Inner Loop concept Inner Loop & Outer Loop The edit-build-test cycle a developer repeats dozens of times an hour, entirely on their own machine or environment.
Inner Loop Latency metric Inner Loop & Outer Loop The time from changing a line to observing its effect, repeated dozens of times a day and therefore the highest-leverage number in developer experience.
Inner-Loop Multiplier Frequency Times Duration, Daily Friction Cost concept Inner Loop & Outer Loop The reason inner-loop friction dominates developer productivity - the loop runs dozens of times a day, so a small duration difference multiplies into hours, while the outer loop runs a few times.
InnerSource practice InnerSource Applying open-source collaboration practices inside an organisation, so teams can contribute to code they do not own instead of waiting for it.
InnerSource Contribution Contract Contribution Contract, InnerSource Maintainer Contract practice InnerSource The published statement of what a shared internal component accepts what it refuses and how fast it will answer - which makes a maintainer's "no" fast and survivable instead of turning openness into an unbound…
Insider Risk by Design concept Auditability Designing so that a legitimate operator cannot silently exceed their remit, treating the trusted internal user as part of the threat model.
Instagram's Early Scaling case-study Architecture Fundamentals Instagram reached tens of millions of users on Django and PostgreSQL with a handful of engineers, by deliberately choosing boring technology and doing the simple thing first.
Instance Family concept Compute Models A group of instance types sharing a resource profile — general purpose, compute optimised, memory optimised, storage optimised, accelerated — chosen by which resource the workload actually exhausts first.
Instance Family Selection practice Compute Optimisation Matching a workload's resource profile to a machine type designed for it, which is frequently a larger saving than reducing size.
Integrated Cache Tier Cache-Behind-the-Client, Storage-Managed Cache, Transparent Cache pattern Caching Strategies Placing the cache inside the storage layer's own client rather than in each calling application, so invalidation is driven by the change stream and consistency semantics are defined once instead of per team.
Integration Change Amplification Counterparty Fan-Out, Schema Change Blast Radius metric Enterprise Integration The number of independently owned systems that must change when one system revises its interface - the measure that decides whether an integration estate is expensive to change, and the one that a hub is meant…
Integration Coupling Modes concept Integration Patterns The distinct dimensions along which two systems can be coupled — temporal, format, location, semantic — each with its own remedy.
Integration Frequency metric Continuous Integration Discipline How often each engineer merges to the mainline — the measurement that distinguishes continuous integration from having a CI server.
Integration Landscape concept Enterprise Integration The inventory of connections between systems, which is usually larger, less documented and more expensive than the application inventory itself.
Integration Log of Record Log as Source of Truth, Monolog Pattern pattern Enterprise Integration An ordered, retained log that every consuming system reads from, replacing point-to-point integrations so that a new consumer can rebuild its entire view by replaying history instead of negotiating a back-fill.
Integration Test Boundary concept Integration Test Boundaries The deliberate choice of what a test includes and what it stubs, which determines both what the test can detect and what it costs.
Integration Throughput Ceiling Merge Queue Capacity, Serial Merge Limit metric Continuous Integration Discipline The maximum merges per day a verification pipeline can admit, set by run duration and merge concurrency, which caps how many engineers can integrate continuously before behaviour changes.
Intended Use Statement Scope of Use, Out-of-Scope Use Declaration practice Model Documentation The part of model documentation that states what the model is validated for and what it must not be used for, so that a deployer can tell whether their use case is covered.
Interaction Modelling practice Sequence Diagrams Showing the ordered exchange of messages between participants over time, to reason about protocols, failure points and latency.
Interaction to Next Paint INP, Responsiveness Metric metric Real User Monitoring A field metric reporting one of the slowest complete interactions on a page - input delay plus handler processing plus the wait for the next paint - which replaced First Input Delay as a Core Web Vital on 12 M…
Interest-Based Negotiation Principled Negotiation, Positions vs Interests practice Negotiation Negotiating against what each party actually needs rather than what they have asked for, which opens options that the stated positions foreclose.
Intermediate-State Diagram Transition-State View, Migration Step View pattern Architecture Diagrams A short series of diagrams showing the system at each step between today and the target, each marking which store is authoritative and where rollback stops being possible.
Internal Consumer SLO metric Platform SLOs A reliability commitment made to teams who cannot switch supplier, which is why it must be measured from their side rather than from the platform's.
Internal Developer Platform IDP, Developer Platform concept Internal Developer Platform The curated set of self-service capabilities that lets product teams build, deploy and operate software without filing tickets against infrastructure.
Internationalisation i18n practice Internationalisation Designing so that language, region and culture are parameters rather than assumptions — cheap upfront and very expensive to retrofit.
Interruption Tolerance concept Spot & Interruptible Capacity The property that determines whether a workload can use heavily discounted pre-emptible capacity, defined by what happens when an instance is reclaimed at short notice.
Invalid-Clock Boot Epoch Boot, Clock-Zero Boot, Time-Before-Trust Problem concept Physical-World Failure Modes A device booting with no trustworthy notion of time, which makes certificate validity unverifiable and creates a dependency loop - correct time needs a trusted connection and a trusted connection needs correct time.