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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
Modularity concept Architecture Fundamentals The degree to which a system is composed of parts that can be understood, changed and replaced independently.
Modularity via the Modular Monolith Modulith pattern Modularity A single deployable unit with strictly enforced internal module boundaries — the default most organisations should exhaust before distributing.
Module Dependency Enforcement practice Modular Monolith Automated checks that prevent one module from importing another's internals, giving a monolith the boundary discipline of separate services.
Module Federation Micro Frontends pattern Module Federation Composing a frontend from independently deployed pieces — solving an organisational problem at a real technical cost.
Module Public Surface Module Exported Surface, Module Entry Points concept Modular Monolith The set of types a module lets other modules reach, which decides how much of it can be rewritten or extracted without touching anyone else's code.
Monolith vs Microservices concept Architecture Decision-Making A trade of deployment independence against distributed-systems complexity, decided by team topology far more often than by technology.
Monzo's Microservice Estate case-study Software Architecture Monzo runs a bank on well over a thousand microservices, and the interesting engineering is in the platform and network isolation that makes that number survivable.
Move Group Migration Affinity Group, Move Wave Affinity Set practice Rehosting The set of workloads that must cross to the new infrastructure in the same wave because the round trips between them sit on a user-facing critical path, derived from observed network flows rather than from the…
Multi-Cloud concept Cloud Architecture Deliberately running across more than one cloud provider — a decision with a much higher cost than the lock-in it is usually adopted to avoid.
Multi-Factor Authentication MFA, 2FA practice Authentication Requiring evidence from more than one category — something you know, have, or are — so a single stolen credential is insufficient.
Multi-Leader Replication Multi-Master, Active-Active Replication pattern Replication Accepting writes at more than one node and replicating between them, which removes the single-primary bottleneck and introduces write conflicts.
Multi-Region Active-Active pattern Multi-Region Architecture Serving live traffic from two or more regions simultaneously, which removes failover time and introduces distributed data problems permanently.
Multi-Region Architecture Regional Architecture Posture, Cross-Region Topology concept Multi-Region Architecture Running a system in more than one cloud region, which is a ladder of four distinct postures with different costs and guarantees rather than a single property - and the posture a team needs is rarely the one it…
Multi-Window Multi-Burn-Rate Alerting practice SLO Monitoring Alerting on how fast an error budget is being consumed, over two time windows simultaneously, to get both fast detection and few false alarms.
Mutable Image Tag Repushed Tag, Tag Drift concept Artifact Management A registry tag that can be repointed to different content, so the same reference resolves to different artefacts over time or in different places - which makes deployments unreproducible and audit answers wrong.
Mutation Scope Selection Incremental Mutation Analysis, Diff-Scoped Mutation Testing practice Mutation Testing Restricting mutation analysis to the lines a change touches and to code whose failure is expensive, so a technique that costs one to two orders of magnitude more than the test suite still fits inside a pull-re…
Mutation Score metric Mutation Testing The proportion of deliberately introduced faults that the test suite detects — a measure of whether tests would notice a defect, unlike coverage.
Mutation Testing tool Mutation Testing Deliberately introducing small faults into the code and measuring how many the test suite detects, as a measure of test strength rather than test reach.
Mutual TLS mTLS, Client Certificate Authentication protocol TLS & Certificates TLS in which both ends present certificates, so the server authenticates the client cryptographically rather than by a shared secret.
N+1 and 2N Redundancy pattern Redundancy Provisioning one spare beyond required capacity versus provisioning double, and the failure assumptions each encodes.
N+1 Resolution DataLoader Problem concept GraphQL The default GraphQL execution behaviour in which each field resolver runs per item, producing one query per row instead of one query per request.
Namespace Tenancy pattern Platform Tenancy Isolating teams within a shared cluster by namespace plus quota plus network policy, and being explicit about what that does not isolate.
Narrative Arc practice Presentation Skills Structuring a technical presentation as a problem, tension and resolution rather than as an ordered dump of findings.
NAT Gateway Network Address Translation tool Networking A managed device that lets instances in a private subnet make outbound connections without being reachable inbound.
NAT Gateways tool NAT & Egress The component that lets private instances reach the internet, and one of the most reliably surprising line items on a cloud bill.
Negotiation practice Negotiation Reaching decisions with people whose objectives differ — by working from interests rather than positions, and by making trades explicit.
Netflix Open Connect case-study Networking Netflix built its own CDN and placed appliances inside ISP networks, turning the most expensive part of its cost structure into hardware it controls.
Netflix Spinnaker: Automated Canary Analysis Spinnaker, Kayenta case-study Progressive Delivery Netflix made canary analysis a statistical comparison run by a machine rather than an engineer watching a dashboard.
Netflix's Recommendation Architecture case-study Data Architecture Netflix splits personalisation into offline, nearline and online layers so that expensive computation happens ahead of time and the request path stays fast.
Netflix: Chaos Monkey and the Simian Army Simian Army, Chaos Kong case-study Chaos Engineering Netflix deliberately terminated production instances during business hours to force engineers to build for failure rather than hope against it.
Netflix: From Hystrix to Adaptive Concurrency Limits Hystrix, Concurrency Limits case-study Circuit Breakers Netflix's widely-copied circuit breaker library was retired in favour of limits that derive themselves from observed latency, because static thresholds go stale.
Netflix: Regional Evacuation Chaos Kong, Region Failover case-study Multi-Region Architecture Netflix rehearses shifting all traffic out of an entire AWS region, which is what makes the capability real rather than documented.
Network API Gateways tool API Gateways The ingress component that terminates external connections and routes into the estate — considered from the network rather than the API-management angle.
Network Performance concept Network Performance Latency is bounded by physics and bandwidth is bought — so architectural performance work is mostly about reducing round trips and moving data closer.
Network Performance Tuning practice Network Performance Tuning The application-level and connection-level changes that actually improve networked performance, in order of effect.
Nines Table concept Availability Mathematics The mapping between availability percentages and permitted downtime, and the cost curve that comes with it.
Noisy Neighbour Resource Contention, Co-Tenant Interference, Shared-Fate Degradation concept Platform Tenancy One workload degrading others by consuming a shared resource - and specifically the resources nobody set limits on, such as control-plane capacity, node network bandwidth and local disk.
Non-Functional Acceptance practice Non-Functional Test Strategy Treating quality-attribute targets as acceptance criteria with automated verification, so a release can fail on latency the way it fails on a broken feature.
Non-Functional Budget Quality Attribute Budget, Latency Budget Allocation practice Functional vs Non-Functional Splitting a system-level quality target into per-component allowances with named owners, so a change can be shown to have spent someone's allowance rather than merely argued about.
Non-Functional Requirement NFR, Quality Attribute concept Architecture Fundamentals A requirement about how well the system must behave rather than what it must do — latency, availability, throughput, security, cost.
Non-Functional Test Strategy practice Non-Functional Test Strategy The plan for how each quality attribute claim will be demonstrated, tying every NFR to a test that could falsify it.
Normalisation Normal Forms practice Relational Modelling Organising a schema so each fact is stored exactly once, removing the update anomalies that duplication creates.
Normalised Client Cache Entity Cache, Client-Side Store, Identity-Keyed Cache pattern Client Caching & Data Layer Caching server responses as entities keyed by identity rather than as whole responses keyed by request, so that updating an entity once updates every view that displays it.
NoSQL Stores Non-Relational Databases concept NoSQL Stores Storage engines that trade query flexibility and cross-entity transactions for predictable performance at scale under known access patterns.
OAuth 2.0 protocol Security Architecture An authorisation framework that lets an application obtain scoped, delegated access to a resource without handling the user's credentials.
Object Count Quota Resource Count Limit, Control-Plane Quota practice Platform Tenancy A per-tenant limit on how many control-plane objects a team may create, which is the control that prevents one team's design choice from exhausting the shared configuration store every other team depends on.
Object Storage concept Cloud Architecture Flat, HTTP-addressable storage for immutable blobs with rich metadata — effectively unlimited, cheap, and not a filesystem.
Object-Level Authorization BOLA, IDOR concept Authorization Checking that the caller is entitled to the specific record they requested, not merely that they may call the endpoint.
Objection Register Opt-Out Register pattern Lawful Basis & Purpose Limitation The durable default-allow counterpart to a consent store, holding every objection and opt-out and consulted at use time by every job, because switching a lawful basis from consent to legitimate interests inver…
Obligation Mapping practice Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture Translating each legal or regulatory requirement into the specific design constraints it imposes, so that compliance becomes a set of testable properties rather than a document.
Observability concept Observability The property of being able to answer new questions about a system's internal state from its external outputs, without shipping new code.
Observability Cost concept Observability Cost Monitoring spend that grows with traffic and frequently reaches a meaningful fraction of infrastructure cost — controlled by sampling, cardinality and retention.
Observability in Practice Telemetry, Instrumentation pattern Observability The three signals, what each is actually for, and why the links between them matter more than any of them individually.
Observable Component Contract Rendered Surface Contract, Implicit Component API concept Component Contracts The full set of things a consumer can depend on in a shared component - DOM structure, class names, computed spacing, specificity and render timing - as distinct from its declared props, which is the only part…
Offline-First Architecture pattern Offline-First Treating the local device store as the primary source the application reads and writes, with the network as an asynchronous replication channel.
Offload Freshness Contract As-At Read Contract, Published Staleness Budget pattern Mainframe Modernization An explicit published staleness budget for a read copy that serves traffic taken off a core system, enforced by the copy itself, so that silently stale answers become visible failures rather than wrong decisions.
Offset Management concept Event Streaming How a consumer records its position in a stream, and the decision that determines whether processing is at-least-once or at-most-once.
OLTP vs OLAP concept Data Warehousing Two workload shapes with opposite requirements — many small indexed transactions versus few large scans and aggregations — which is why they belong in different stores.
On-Call practice On-Call The rotation that responds to production problems — a system whose health is measured by whether the people in it can sustain being in it.
One-Way Door Irreversible Decision, Type 1 Decision, Foreclosed Option concept Reversibility A decision whose reversal is prohibitively expensive or impossible, which is where analytical effort belongs - as distinct from the reversible majority, where deliberation typically costs more than being wrong.