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

73 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Service Discovery	concept	Distributed Systems	The mechanism by which a caller finds a currently healthy network address for a service whose instances are ephemeral.
Service Registry	tool	Service Discovery	The database of currently available service instances and their addresses, maintained by registration and pruned by health checking.
Shuffle Sharding	pattern	Distributed Systems	Assigning each customer a random combination of workers rather than a fixed shard, so that any two customers rarely share their whole set.
Split Brain	concept	Distributed Systems	A partition in which two halves of a cluster each believe they are authoritative, and both accept writes.
Split Vote	concept	Leader Election	An election in which no candidate obtains a majority, so the term ends with no leader and the process must repeat.
Thread Pool Isolation	pattern	Bulkheads & Isolation	Giving each downstream dependency its own pool of threads or permits, so one slow dependency cannot consume the capacity needed to serve everything else.
Thundering Herd	concept	Distributed Systems	A large number of clients acting simultaneously because they were synchronised by a shared event, producing a spike that the steady-state design never sized for.
Timeout Budget Deadline Propagation	pattern	Distributed Systems	Assigning a request an overall deadline at the edge and passing the remaining time down each hop, so no service works on something already out of time.
Try-Confirm-Cancel TCC, Reservation Pattern	pattern	Distributed Transactions	A three-phase distributed transaction where each participant first reserves resources, and a coordinator then confirms or cancels all reservations.
Two-Phase Commit 2PC, XA	protocol	Distributed Systems	A blocking protocol for atomic commit across several resources: a coordinator asks all participants to prepare, then tells them all to commit or abort.
Version Vector Vector Clock	concept	Clocks & Ordering	A per-replica counter set that lets a system tell whether one version causally descends from another or whether the two are genuinely concurrent.
Visibility Timeout	concept	Messaging & Queues	The period after a consumer receives a message during which it is hidden from other consumers, before it becomes available again for redelivery.
XA Transaction	protocol	Distributed Transactions	The X/Open standard interface for two-phase commit across heterogeneous resource managers, still common in enterprise middleware and rarely the right choice for new services.