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

89 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Point-in-Time Recovery PITR	concept	Backup Strategies	Restoring a database to any moment within a retention window by replaying transaction logs onto a base backup, rather than only to a snapshot boundary.
Pre-Scaling Scheduled Scaling, Predictive Scaling	practice	Autoscaling	Provisioning capacity before demand arrives, based on a forecast or a known event, because autoscaling cannot respond faster than its provisioning loop.
Preventive Guardrail Policy as Prevention, Deny-by-Default Control	practice	Cloud Governance	A control that makes a non-compliant action impossible, rather than detecting it afterwards and generating a ticket.
Provisioned vs Serverless Capacity	concept	Cloud Databases	Paying for a fixed database size continuously, versus paying for capacity consumed with automatic scaling — a crossover decision driven by duty cycle.
Regional Evacuation Region Failover Drill	practice	Multi-Region Architecture	The deliberate, rehearsed act of shifting all traffic out of a region — treated as a routine operation rather than an emergency procedure.
Resource Requests and Limits	concept	Kubernetes	The declared minimum a container is guaranteed (request) and the maximum it may consume (limit) — the two numbers that determine scheduling, packing and throttling.
Restore Drill	practice	Backup Strategies	A scheduled, timed exercise of restoring from backup into a clean environment — the only thing that converts a backup from a hope into a control.
Revocation Path Fast-Propagation Channel, Fail-Closed Config	pattern	Cloud Governance	A separate, short-TTL, fail-closed channel for security-critical configuration changes, coexisting with an eventually-consistent cached channel for ordinary configuration.
Scheduled Capacity Predictive Provisioning, Calendar-Driven Scaling	practice	Autoscaling	Provisioning ahead of a known event rather than reacting to its traffic - the correct primary control for any spike whose rise time is shorter than an autoscaler's reaction time.
Serverless	concept	Cloud Architecture	A model where the provider allocates and scales compute per request, and you are billed for execution rather than for provisioned capacity.
Serverless Cold Start	concept	Serverless	The additional latency when a function invocation must allocate and initialise a new execution environment rather than reusing a warm one.
Serverless Compute in Practice Functions as a Service, FaaS	concept	Serverless	Compute billed per invocation with no capacity to manage — excellent for bursty low-duty-cycle work, expensive and constrained for sustained load.
Service Control Policy SCP, Azure Policy, Organization Policy	tool	Landing Zones	An organisation-level guardrail that limits what any identity in an account may do, regardless of the permissions granted within that account.
Service Quota Service Limit	concept	Cloud Governance	A per-account, per-region cap on how much of a resource may be used — a common and easily-avoided cause of scaling failures and DR failures.
Shared Responsibility Model	concept	Managed Services	The division of duties between provider and customer, which shifts with the service model and is routinely misunderstood in the customer's disfavour.
Slack 2021: When Autoscaling Cannot Keep Up Slack January 2021 Outage	case-study	Autoscaling	The first Monday back after the holidays produced a traffic ramp that outpaced the scaling behaviour of a managed network component, and the degradation cascaded.
Slack's Cellular Migration	case-study	Cloud Architecture	After repeated availability-zone-level incidents, Slack rebuilt its infrastructure into per-zone cells with the ability to drain traffic away from a failing zone in minutes.
Static Stability Fail Static, Configuration Inertia, Control-Plane Independence	concept	Cloud Architecture	Designing a system so it continues operating correctly on its existing configuration during a failure, requiring no control-plane action to survive - because control planes are the part most likely to be unava…
Storage Tiering Lifecycle Management, Hot-Warm-Cold Storage	practice	Cloud Storage	Placing objects in storage classes according to access probability, so cost tracks usage rather than volume.
Superseded-Work Cancellation Build Cancellation, Queue Deduplication	practice	Containers	Cancelling queued work that a later submission has made irrelevant - usually the largest single capacity saving available during a burst, and almost free to implement.
Tagging Strategy	practice	Cloud Governance	A defined, enforced set of metadata labels applied to every resource, without which cost allocation, ownership and lifecycle automation are all impossible.
Target Tracking Scaling	pattern	Autoscaling	An autoscaling policy that adds or removes capacity to hold a chosen metric near a target value, like a thermostat, rather than reacting to threshold breaches.
Terraform State IaC State File	concept	Infrastructure as Code	The file mapping declared resources to real infrastructure, without which the tool cannot tell what it already created — and which becomes critical infrastructure in its own right.
Verified Recovery Restore Assurance, Tested Recoverability	metric	Backup Strategies	The measure that matters in data protection - the proportion of backups demonstrably restorable within the stated RTO - as opposed to backup success rate, which is near 100% even where recovery is impossible.
Warm Pool	pattern	Autoscaling	Pre-initialised instances held in a stopped or standby state so that scaling out skips boot and application warm-up.
Warm Standby	practice	Disaster Recovery	A continuously-replicated, scaled-down running copy of a system in a second location, ready to take traffic within minutes.
Well-Architected Review	practice	Cloud Architecture	A structured self-assessment of a workload against defined pillars — operational excellence, security, reliability, performance, cost, and sustainability.
Zonal vs Regional Services	concept	Availability Zones	Whether a cloud resource lives in one availability zone or is inherently spread across several — a property that determines what a zone failure takes with it.
Zoom's Pandemic Scale-Up	case-study	Cloud Architecture	Zoom grew from around 10 million to over 300 million daily meeting participants in roughly three months, absorbed by a hybrid architecture and a distributed media routing design.