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

81 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Security Group Sprawl	concept	Network Security	The accumulation of firewall and security group rules that nobody can safely remove, producing a permissive posture nobody chose.
Security Incident Response	practice	Security Incident Response	Responding to a compromise — where the architecture determines whether you can detect it, contain it, and prove what happened.
Server-Side Request Forgery SSRF	concept	OWASP Risks	Inducing a server to make an HTTP request to an attacker-chosen destination, turning it into a proxy into networks and services the attacker cannot reach directly.
Signing Boundary Policy Policy at the HSM, Constrained Signing	pattern	Key Management	Enforcing transaction policy at the hardware signing boundary rather than in application code, so that a compromised application cannot obtain an arbitrary signature.
Software Bill of Materials SBOM	tool	Supply Chain Security	A machine-readable inventory of every component and dependency in a piece of software, including transitive ones, used to answer exposure questions quickly.
Standing Credential Long-Lived Credential, Persistent Secret, Static Key	concept	Secrets Management	A credential that remains valid indefinitely, so a single leak grants permanent access - the property that converts a small compromise into a large one, and the one a secrets manager does not fix.
Step-Up Authentication	pattern	Authentication	Requiring stronger proof of identity at the moment a consequential action is attempted, rather than applying maximum friction to every session.
STRIDE	practice	Threat Modelling	A mnemonic for six threat categories — spoofing, tampering, repudiation, information disclosure, denial of service, elevation of privilege — walked across each component and data flow.
Supply Chain Attestation SLSA, Provenance Attestation	practice	Supply Chain Security	A signed statement about how an artifact was produced — from which source, by which builder, with which inputs — verified before deployment.
Tag-Bound Access Policy Classification-Driven Access Control, Tag-Based Masking	pattern	Data Classification	An access rule attached to a classification label rather than to a table, so that tagging data is what applies the control and derived copies inherit it through lineage.
Tamper-Evident Log	pattern	Auditability	An audit log constructed so that any modification or deletion of past entries is detectable, typically by chaining entries cryptographically.
Threat Model Trust Boundary	concept	Threat Modelling	The line across which data or control passes from a less trusted context to a more trusted one, and where validation and authorisation must occur.
Threat Modelling	practice	Security Architecture	A structured exercise that identifies what can go wrong with a design, before it is built, by walking the system's trust boundaries.
Token Audience Validation Audience Restriction, aud Claim	practice	Tokens & JWTs	Verifying that a signed token was issued for the service consuming it, without which a legitimately obtained low-privilege token is replayable against a high-privilege service.
Token Exchange RFC 8693, Delegation Token	protocol	OAuth 2.0 & OIDC	Trading one token for another with different scope, audience or subject, so a service can call downstream on a user's behalf without reusing the original token.
Token Introspection	protocol	OAuth 2.0 & OIDC	Asking the authorisation server whether a token is currently valid, rather than validating it locally from its signature.
Token Revocation Gap	concept	Tokens & JWTs	The window between deciding a token should no longer be valid and it actually ceasing to work, which for self-contained tokens is its remaining lifetime.
Transactional Audit Emission Audit in the Same Transaction, Complete Audit Guarantee	practice	Auditability	Writing the audit record in the same transaction as the state change it describes, so that a crash cannot produce a change with no record - the property that distinguishes an audit trail from application logging.
Web Application Firewall WAF	tool	Network Security	A filter in front of an application that inspects HTTP requests and blocks those matching known attack patterns — useful as a layer, dangerous as a substitute.
Workload Identity SPIFFE, Managed Identity, Service Identity	concept	Identity & Access Management	Giving a running workload a cryptographic identity derived from its platform context, so it can authenticate without a stored credential.
Zero Trust	concept	Security Architecture	A security model that grants no implicit trust from network position, and authenticates and authorises every request individually.