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Terminology

2205 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 areas2205 Architecture Fundamentals77 Distributed Systems107 Data Architecture110 Cloud Architecture94 Networking88 API & Integration Architecture82 Reliability & Resilience75 Observability70 Performance & Capacity Engineering72 Security Architecture86 Cost Architecture & FinOps71 Business Architecture67 Architecture Communication67 Enterprise Architecture66 Legacy Modernization71 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 concept794 practice734 pattern368 metric125 case-study77 tool62 protocol45

2205 terms shown.

Term Kind Topic What it is
Manual Fallback Capacity Degraded-Mode Throughput, Paper-Process Capacity practice Business Continuity The transactions per hour a business can actually complete without its system - the measured number that says whether a recovery-time objective is survivable and how long the catch-up takes.
Mass Assignment Auto-Binding, Over-Posting concept Secure API Design A vulnerability where a request body is bound directly to an internal object, allowing a caller to set fields the API never intended to expose.
Master Data Management MDM, Golden Record practice Master Data Management Establishing a single authoritative version of core business entities that appear inconsistently across many systems.
Match Confidence Band Match Threshold Band, Review Band metric Master Data Management The score range between automatic merge and automatic reject in record matching, which is where a consolidation programme's permanent staffing cost lives and where its worst errors are prevented.
Material Outsourcing Notification practice Sector Cloud Rules The regulatory obligation to inform a supervisor before placing a critical function with a third party, which puts cloud adoption on a timeline architecture must respect.
Materialised Read Model Projection, Read Model practice CQRS A precomputed, query-shaped copy of data maintained asynchronously from the system of record - and the operational obligations that come with it.
Materialised View Pattern pattern Materialized Views Maintaining a pre-computed, query-shaped copy of data so reads are cheap, at the cost of write amplification and staleness.
Materialized View pattern Data Architecture A precomputed, stored result of a query, refreshed on a schedule or from a change stream, read instead of recomputing.
Medallion Architecture Bronze Silver Gold, Multi-Hop Architecture pattern Medallion Architecture Layering a data platform into raw, cleaned and business-ready zones so that reprocessing is always possible and quality improves in defined steps.
Mentoring practice Mentoring Developing other people's architectural judgement — the highest-leverage activity available to a senior architect.
Mentoring Ladder practice Mentoring Adjusting the level of direction given to someone according to their experience with the specific task, from demonstration through to sponsorship.
Merge Queue Merge Train, Serialised Integration practice Continuous Integration Discipline Testing each change against the combination that will actually exist after merge, rather than against the base it was written on - preventing the broken trunk that concurrent merges produce.
Merge Upsert pattern Ingestion Patterns Applying a batch of changes to a target by matching on a key and inserting, updating or deleting per row, which is expensive and frequently avoidable.
Mesh Control Plane concept Service Mesh The component that configures and coordinates a service mesh's data plane proxies, distributing policy, identity and routing rules.
Message Formats concept Message Formats JSON, Protobuf, Avro and the rest — chosen by who the consumer is and how the schema will evolve.
Message Ordering concept Messaging & Queues The guarantee about the sequence in which messages are delivered — normally per-partition or per-group only, and lost the moment consumption is parallelised.
Message Overhead Budget concept Constrained Protocols The proportion of each transmission spent on protocol rather than payload, which on a metered or battery-powered link determines the running cost.
Message Queue Work Queue, Job Queue pattern Messaging & Queues A durable buffer between a producer and a worker that decouples them in time, absorbs bursts, and turns a synchronous dependency into a retryable one.
Message Queue tool Distributed Systems A store that holds messages until a consumer processes them, decoupling producer availability and rate from consumer availability and rate.
Message Router pattern Integration Patterns A component that inspects a message and forwards it to one of several destinations based on its content or headers.
Message Translator pattern Integration Patterns A component converting a message between two systems' formats, so neither has to adopt the other's model.
Meta 2021: The Outage That Locked Out Its Own Engineers Facebook October 2021 Outage case-study Routing & BGP A backbone configuration command withdrew Facebook's BGP routes globally, and the tools needed to fix it depended on the network that had just disappeared.
Metadata Harvesting practice Data Catalog Populating a catalogue automatically from the systems that hold the data, because anything requiring manual entry will be incomplete within a quarter.
Metadata Read Amplification Planning-Time Amplification, Manifest Read Blow-Up concept Open Table Formats The number of small sequential metadata requests a table format issues before reading any data, which grows with file history and turns a modest storage slowdown into a large query slowdown.
Metadata-Driven Multi-Tenancy Shared-Table Multi-Tenancy, Metadata Schema pattern Application Architecture Holding each tenant's custom structures as metadata rows over one shared physical schema, so that customisation needs no DDL and one upgrade reaches every tenant at once.
Metadata-Only Migration In-Place Table Adoption, Manifest Generation Migration pattern Open Table Formats Adopting a table format over data files that already exist by generating its metadata in place, so a multi-petabyte conversion becomes a minutes-long commit instead of a full rewrite.
Metastable Failure Congestive Collapse, Death Spiral concept Failure Modes A failure state that sustains itself after the original trigger is gone, because the system's own recovery behaviour generates the load keeping it down.
Metric Cardinality concept Cardinality The number of unique label combinations on a metric, which determines the number of time series stored and is the main driver of monitoring cost and failure.
Metric Certification Certified Metrics, Trusted Tier practice BI Governance Marking a small set of metrics and datasets as governed and authoritative, so that exploration stays free while anything asserted about the business comes from a controlled definition.
Metric Definition Layer pattern Semantic Layer Business metrics defined once in a versioned, tested place and served to every consuming tool, so the number cannot differ by which tool asked.
Metric Staleness Staleness Marker, Stale Series concept Metrics The rules deciding how long a time series keeps answering queries after it stops being written - which determines whether a dead process's last value is served as current, and whether an alert on a vanished se…
Metric Temporality Delta Temporality, Cumulative Temporality concept OpenTelemetry Whether a reported metric point carries a running total since a start time or only the change during one interval - the choice that decides whether process restarts or duplicate deliveries are what corrupts yo…
Metrics concept Metrics Cheap pre-aggregated numeric time series — excellent for knowing something is wrong, structurally unable to tell you which request.
Micro-Batching Mini-Batch Streaming, Discretised Stream Processing pattern Streaming vs Batch Executing a stream as a sequence of small bounded jobs on a fixed trigger interval, which buys batch failure semantics and atomic sink commits at the price of a latency floor equal to the interval.
Micro-Frontend pattern Micro-Frontends Splitting a web interface into independently developed and deployed pieces owned by different teams, composed at build time, server time or runtime.
Microsegmentation pattern Zero Trust Enforcing fine-grained network policy between individual workloads rather than between broad network zones, so a compromise cannot move laterally.
Microservices pattern Software Architecture An architectural style where an application is a set of independently deployable services, each owning its data and aligned to a business capability.
Migration Risk practice Migration Risk The specific risks migrations carry, and the controls that reduce each — with reversibility as the master control.
Migration Risk Register practice Migration Risk A maintained record of what could go wrong in a migration, with likelihood, impact, owner and mitigation, reviewed as the programme progresses.
Migration Wave practice Cloud Migration A batch of applications migrated together, sequenced so that dependencies move in a workable order and each wave delivers learning for the next.
Minimum Necessary Access concept Healthcare Data Protection Restricting each user to the health information required for their specific role and, in the strong form, to the patients they are actually treating.
Minimum Storage Duration Charge Early Deletion Fee, Minimum Billable Duration concept Storage Costs The contractual floor on how long an object in a cheaper storage class is billed for, which converts deletions and extra lifecycle hops inside that window into charges rather than savings.
ML Platform concept ML Platform The infrastructure that makes machine learning repeatable — data, features, training, deployment, monitoring — where the model is the small part.
Mobile App Architecture concept Mobile App Architecture Client architecture where the release cycle is not yours, old versions persist indefinitely, and the network is unreliable.
Mobile Release Strategy practice Mobile Release Strategy Shipping to an app store where review adds latency, users choose when to update, and old versions therefore stay live indefinitely.
Model Card tool Model Documentation A structured document describing a model's intended use, training data, evaluation results, limitations and ethical considerations.
Model Cascade Tiered Inference, Escalation Ladder pattern Model Selection A cheap fast model handling the clear majority of cases with escalation to a larger model or a human for the uncertain ones - usually a large cost reduction with no quality loss, because the expensive path run…
Model Context Protocol MCP protocol AI-Era Architecture An open protocol that standardises how AI applications connect to external tools, data sources and prompts.
Model Drift Monitoring practice AI Observability Detecting that a deployed model's inputs or performance have shifted away from the conditions it was validated under.
Model Graph Pruning Removing Unused Models, DAG Hygiene practice Transformation Frameworks Periodically removing transformation models with no downstream consumers - the cheapest available reduction in a build's cost and duration, and the one nobody owns.
Model Inventory AI Register, Model Registry, Deployed Model Catalogue practice Model Risk Management A complete record of every model deployed in the organisation with its owner, purpose, risk tier and review date - the precondition for any AI governance, and the thing most organisations do not have.
Model Inventory Model Register, AI System Register practice Model Risk Management A maintained register of every model making or informing decisions - the prerequisite without which no other model governance control can be applied.
Model Risk Management MRM, SR 11-7 practice Model Risk Management The discipline of governing the risk that a model is wrong, is used incorrectly, or is applied outside the conditions it was built for.
Model Router pattern AI-Era Architecture Directing each request to a model chosen by the task's difficulty, cost and latency budget, rather than sending everything to the largest model available.
Model Routing pattern Model Selection Directing each request to the cheapest model capable of handling it, rather than sending all traffic to the most capable one.
Model Translation Boundary pattern Anti-Corruption Layer The layer at which an external system's model is converted into your own, preventing its concepts and accidents from spreading into your domain.
Modernisation Business Case practice Modernisation Business Case Justifying modernisation work, where the benefits are diffuse, the costs are concrete, and "it is old" persuades nobody.
Modernisation Value Case practice Modernisation Business Case The argument that funds a modernisation programme, built on quantified business consequence rather than on technical obsolescence.
Modular Monolith pattern Architecture Patterns A single deployable unit internally partitioned into modules with enforced boundaries, explicit interfaces and no shared internal state.
Modular Monolith Boundaries pattern Modular Monolith A single deployable unit with strictly enforced internal module boundaries, giving domain separation without distribution.