Terminology

2225 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 areas2225 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 Architecture74 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 Architecture69 Streaming & Real-Time Data69 Data Governance & Semantics74 Frontend & Experience Architecture66 Edge, Mobile & IoT68 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture65 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk69

Kind Any concept801 practice736 pattern377 metric127 case-study77 tool62 protocol45

71 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Shopify's Pods and Modular Monolith	case-study	Architecture Patterns	Shopify handles Black Friday scale with isolated pods — complete stacks each serving a subset of merchants — while keeping the application itself a deliberately modular monolith.
Sidecar	pattern	Architecture Patterns	Deploying a helper process alongside the main application in the same unit, to supply cross-cutting behaviour without changing the application.
Sidecar Interception Boundary Mesh Coverage Boundary, Proxy Capture Scope	concept	Sidecar & Ambassador	The precise set of traffic a sidecar proxy actually sees and can secure, which is narrower than "all traffic from this pod" and is what decides whether a mesh's guarantees apply to a given call.
Sidecar Resource Overhead	concept	Sidecar & Ambassador	The cumulative CPU, memory and latency cost of running helper containers alongside every application container.
Strangler Fig	pattern	Strangler Fig	Replacing a legacy system incrementally by routing individual capabilities to new implementations until nothing is left running on the old one.
Strangler Fig Strangler Pattern	pattern	Architecture Patterns	Replacing a legacy system incrementally by routing individual capabilities to new implementations behind a facade, until nothing routes to the old system.
Transactional Outbox Outbox Table, Reliable Event Publication, Store-and-Forward Events	pattern	Outbox	Writing an event into a table within the same transaction as the business change, then publishing it separately - so the event exists if and only if the change committed, which no ordering of two independent w…
Transactional Outbox Outbox Pattern	pattern	Outbox	Writing an event into the same database transaction as the state change, then relaying it, to eliminate the dual-write problem.
Twitter Timelines: Fan-Out on Write, Except for Celebrities Timeline Fan-Out, Hybrid Fan-Out	case-study	Materialized Views	Precomputing every user's timeline at write time is fast to read and impossible for accounts with millions of followers, so the two approaches are combined.
View Staleness Window	concept	Materialized Views	The maximum age of data in a precomputed view, which must be an explicit, monitored contract rather than an incidental property.
Visibility Timeout Message Lease, Invisibility Window	concept	Competing Consumers	The period a claimed message is hidden from other consumers - too short and work is duplicated, too long and a crashed worker stalls the item.