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

66 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Traffic Shadowing Dark Launch, Mirroring, Shadow Traffic	practice	Strangler Fig	Sending real production traffic to a new implementation alongside the old one, serving the old response and comparing - the only reliable way to find undocumented behaviour before it matters.
TSB 2018: A Big-Bang Migration That Was Not Reversible TSB IT Migration	case-study	Cutover Planning	A UK bank moved millions of customer accounts to a new platform in a single weekend cutover, and the failure locked customers out for weeks.
Write-Ownership Boundary Single-Writer Boundary, Authoritative Writer Assignment	pattern	Coexistence Patterns	The line drawn during coexistence that names exactly one system as the writer for each piece of state, placed along business transaction boundaries so that no single transaction has to commit on both sides.
Zero-Downtime Cutover	practice	Zero-Downtime Migration	Moving a live system to a new implementation or datastore without an outage, using dual writes, backfill and a reversible traffic switch.
Zero-Downtime Deployment in Practice Rolling Deployment, Online Schema Change	practice	Zero-Downtime Migration	Shipping without a maintenance window, and the version-skew constraint that governs every schema and contract change.
Zero-Downtime Migration Expand and Contract, Parallel Change	pattern	Legacy Modernization	Changing a schema or system while it stays in service, by adding the new alongside the old, migrating, then removing the old.