Portfolio ↗

Terminology

2185 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 areas2185 Architecture Fundamentals77 Distributed Systems107 Data Architecture110 Cloud Architecture89 Networking88 API & Integration Architecture82 Reliability & Resilience75 Observability70 Performance & Capacity Engineering72 Security Architecture81 Cost Architecture & FinOps66 Business Architecture67 Architecture Communication67 Enterprise Architecture66 Legacy Modernization66 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 concept785 practice729 pattern362 metric125 case-study77 tool62 protocol45

2185 terms shown.

Term Kind Topic What it is
Anti-Corruption Layer ACL pattern Legacy Modernization A translation layer that converts a legacy or external system's model into your own, so its concepts do not leak into your domain.
Anti-Corruption Layer in Integration pattern Legacy Integration Patterns A translation boundary that keeps a legacy system's model, vocabulary and quirks from leaking into a new system that must integrate with it.
Anycast concept Networking Advertising the same IP address from many locations, so the network routes each client to the topologically nearest one.
Anycast Routing protocol Routing & BGP Announcing the same IP address from many locations so that network routing delivers each client to the topologically nearest one.
API Deprecation Policy practice APIs as Products The published commitment about how long a version is supported, how notice is given, and what consumers can expect — without which nothing is ever retired.
API Documentation practice API Documentation Documentation as part of the product surface — where quality determines adoption more than the API's technical design does.
API Error Design Problem Details, RFC 9457 practice API Error Handling Returning failures in a consistent machine-readable structure that tells a client what went wrong, whether to retry, and what to do about it.
API Gateway pattern API Gateway A single entry point that handles cross-cutting edge concerns — routing, authentication, rate limiting, TLS — so backend services do not each implement them.
API Gateway pattern API & Integration A single entry point in front of a set of services that handles authentication, rate limiting, routing and protocol translation.
API Product Management practice APIs as Products Treating an API as a product with a lifecycle — versioning, deprecation, adoption metrics and a support commitment — rather than as an implementation detail.
API Shapes for UI practice API Shapes for UI Designing APIs for what screens actually need — reducing round trips without coupling the backend to the interface.
API Versioning Strategy practice API Versioning The scheme for introducing incompatible change, and the far more important question of how long old versions live and who pays to migrate.
APM Transaction Tracing tool Application Performance Monitoring Instrumentation that attributes application latency and errors to specific code paths, database queries and external calls, usually with automatic tracing.
Application Architecture concept Application Architecture The set of applications, what each is responsible for, and how they relate — the view that reveals duplication and orphaned ownership.
Application Decomposition practice Application Decomposition Breaking a large application into parts — where finding the seam matters more than the extraction technique.
Application Discovery practice Cloud Migration Establishing what applications exist, what they depend on, who owns them and whether anyone uses them — the step whose absence makes every later step a guess.
Application Landscape concept Application Architecture The inventory of systems in an organisation with their ownership, capabilities supported, integrations and lifecycle status.
Application Performance Monitoring APM tool Application Performance Monitoring Instrumentation that attributes latency and errors to code paths and dependencies inside a service — the layer between metrics and a profiler.
Application Performance Monitoring APM tool Observability Instrumentation inside the application that attributes latency and errors to specific code paths, queries and dependencies.
Application Portfolio Management practice Application Portfolio Management Managing the set of applications as an investment portfolio — deciding what to invest in, maintain, contain and retire.
Application Portfolio Management APM, Application Rationalisation practice Enterprise Architecture Maintaining an inventory of every application with its owner, cost, business value and technical health, and using it to decide what to invest in, replace or retire.
Application Portfolio Rationalisation APM, Portfolio Rationalisation practice Application Rationalisation Systematically assessing every application in the estate to decide what to keep, invest in, consolidate or retire.
Application Rationalisation practice Application Rationalisation Systematically reducing the number of applications in an estate by consolidating duplicates and retiring low-value systems.
Approval Wait Queue Time in Lead Time, Waiting Not Working metric Flow Metrics The portion of lead time spent waiting for a human rather than for a machine - frequently the largest single component and invisible inside the aggregate because nobody measures it separately.
Approximate Nearest Neighbour Index ANN concept Vector Databases An index that trades exactness for speed when finding similar vectors, making large-scale semantic search feasible.
Approximate-Then-Commit Stale Selection Exact Commitment, Two-Phase Precision pattern Materialized Views Selecting candidates from a deliberately stale projection and committing with a conditional write against the authoritative record - which buys cheap selection without sacrificing correctness at the moment it …
Architect Archetypes concept Architecture Roles The distinct scopes of architecture practice — enterprise, solution, domain and application — and the different skills and decision rights each carries.
Architect Career Path concept Career Development The progression from technical depth through breadth to organisational effect, and the skill shifts each stage requires.
Architect Coverage Ratio Architect to Team Ratio, Gatekeeper Ratio metric Architecture Roles Teams served per architect before the role turns into a review queue, used to decide whether to hire reviewers or to remove the need for review.
Architectural Debt concept Evolutionary Architecture Structural compromises that increase the cost of all future change, distinguished from code-level debt by being expensive and slow to repay.
Architectural Driver concept Architecture Fundamentals The small subset of requirements and constraints that actually shape the structure of the system.
Architectural Drivers practice Architectural Drivers The handful of requirements whose change would force the structure to change — the only ones worth designing against.
Architectural Significance Architecturally Significant Decision, Significance Test concept Software Architecture The test that separates decisions worth reviewing from the ones a team should make alone, by asking what undoing each one would cost rather than how technical it sounds.
Architecturally Significant Requirement ASR practice Architectural Drivers The small subset of requirements whose change would force the structure to change - the only ones an architecture document owes an answer to.
Architecture Compliance Check practice Architecture Compliance Checks Automated verification that a running system still conforms to the architectural decisions and standards it was approved against.
Architecture Cost Model practice Cost & FinOps A calculation, made during design, of what an architecture will cost to run at expected and at peak volume.
Architecture Decision Log ADR Log, Decision Register practice Architecture Communication The ordered, immutable collection of a system's decision records, read as a history rather than as a specification.
Architecture Decision Record ADR practice Architecture Decision-Making A short, immutable document capturing one architectural decision, its context, the alternatives, and its consequences.
Architecture Decision Record Practice practice Decision Practice The habits that make decision records useful six months later — writing at decision time, recording rejected options, and never editing history.
Architecture Development Method concept TOGAF TOGAF's iterative cycle for developing enterprise architecture, which is valuable as a checklist of concerns and harmful when followed literally.
Architecture Documentation practice Architecture Documentation Writing down the decisions and their reasoning at an altitude that stays true long enough to be worth reading.
Architecture Fitness Function in CI Architecture Test, ArchUnit Test practice Fitness Functions An executable check in the build that fails when an architectural constraint is violated, turning a design rule into a property the codebase cannot lose.
Architecture Fitness Test Dependency Rule Test, Architecture Unit Test, Boundary Enforcement practice Modular Monolith An automated check in the build that fails when code violates the intended module dependency rules - the mechanism that decides whether architectural boundaries survive schedule pressure or erode within months.
Architecture Governance Model concept Architecture Governance The definition of which architectural decisions require which level of scrutiny, and who holds the authority for each.
Architecture Principle practice Architecture Principles A durable agreed rule that rules options out, stated with rationale and implications rather than as a slogan.
Architecture Principle practice Architecture Fundamentals A durable, agreed rule that constrains design decisions in advance, stated with its rationale and its implications.
Architecture Review Board ARB, Design Authority practice Enterprise Architecture A forum that reviews significant designs against standards, risks and strategy before commitment.
Architecture Review Practice practice Architecture Reviews Running a design review that improves the design rather than performing gatekeeping, through timing, framing and the questions asked.
Architecture Roadmap practice Architecture Roadmaps A sequenced plan of architectural change expressed as capability outcomes and decision points rather than as a fixed timeline of projects.
Architecture Sinkhole concept Layered Architecture A request that passes through every layer of a layered architecture without any layer adding logic, indicating that the layering is pure overhead for that path.
Architecture Style concept Architecture Styles A system-level organising shape — layered, modular monolith, service-based, microservices, event-driven, space-based — chosen for the properties it makes cheap.
Architecture Style concept Architecture Fundamentals A named, coarse-grained way of organising a whole system, as distinct from a pattern that solves one recurring problem inside it.
Architecture Trade-off Analysis Method ATAM practice Architecture Decision-Making A structured evaluation that scores an architecture against prioritised quality-attribute scenarios and identifies the points where those attributes conflict.
Architecture Viewpoint concept Architecture Documentation A perspective on a system tailored to the concerns of a particular audience, recognising that no single diagram serves everyone.
Archive-and-Shutdown Data-Preserving Decommission, Retire With Retention, Cold Archive Retirement pattern Decommissioning Retiring an application by exporting its data to durable archival storage in a readable format and shutting the application down - separating the obligation to keep data from the obligation to keep software running.
Arrival Rate Model concept Performance Test Design Driving a load test by requests arriving per second regardless of how the system responds, rather than by a fixed number of virtual users.
Arrow Semantics Edge Semantics, Line Notation Discipline practice Architecture Diagrams The rule that every line on an architecture diagram declares what it is - call or data, synchronous or asynchronous, and what happens when it fails - because each meaning implies a different failure mode.
Artefact Promotion Build Once Deploy Many practice Artifact Management Moving the identical tested artefact between environments rather than rebuilding for each - so that what runs in production is what was tested.
Artifact Promotion practice Artifact Management Moving one immutable build between repositories as it earns trust, rather than rebuilding it for each environment.
Artifact Repository Binary Repository, Package Registry tool Artifact Management The system of record for built binaries, container images and packages, holding immutable versioned artifacts with their metadata.