Terminology

454 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 areas454 Architecture Fundamentals16 Distributed Systems73 Data Architecture71 Cloud Architecture55 Networking13 API & Integration Architecture17 Reliability & Resilience16 Observability14 Performance & Capacity Engineering13 Security Architecture50 Cost Architecture & FinOps12 Business Architecture9 Architecture Communication8 Enterprise Architecture8 Legacy Modernization11 AI-Era Architecture15 Software Architecture & Engineering19 Architecture Patterns15 Architecture Decision-Making11 The Architect's Meta-Skills8

Kind Any concept166 practice107 pattern93 case-study26 tool26 protocol22 metric14

71 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Stream-Table Duality	concept	Streaming Data	The equivalence between a stream of changes and a table of current state — each can be derived from the other.
Surrogate Key Synthetic Key	concept	Relational Modelling	A system-generated identifier with no business meaning, used as the primary key instead of a naturally occurring business value.
Synchronous vs Asynchronous Replication	concept	Replication	Whether a write is acknowledged only after a replica has it, trading write latency against the amount of data a failure can lose.
Time Travel Data Versioning, Snapshot Query	concept	Data Lakes & Lakehouses	Querying a table as it existed at a previous version or timestamp, made possible by keeping the metadata and files of prior commits.
Two-Phase Locking 2PL	protocol	Transactions & Isolation	The concurrency control protocol behind serializable isolation — acquire locks in a growing phase, release only in a shrinking phase, never interleaving the two.
Uber's H3 Spatial Index	case-study	Data Architecture	Uber indexes the world with hexagons rather than squares, because uniform neighbour distance makes supply, demand and pricing computations correct as well as fast.
Watermark	concept	Streaming Data	A moving assertion that no events older than a given event-time will arrive, which is what allows an event-time window to be closed and emitted.
Wide-Column Store	tool	NoSQL Stores	A store organised as partitions of sorted rows, designed for very high write throughput and predictable single-partition reads at large scale.
Windowing	concept	Streaming Data	Grouping an unbounded stream into finite chunks so aggregation can produce results, defined over event time rather than arrival time.
Write Skew	concept	Transactions & Isolation	An anomaly where two transactions each read a set of rows, make disjoint writes based on what they read, and together violate an invariant neither could have broken alone.
Write-Ahead Log WAL, Commit Log	concept	Data Architecture	Recording every change to a durable sequential log before applying it, so that a crash can be recovered by replaying the log.