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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
Partner Onboarding practice Partner & B2B Integration The repeatable process by which an external organisation is connected, tested and moved to production — and a common hidden bottleneck.
Pass-Through Cost of Goods Sold Third-Party Unit Cost, Supplier Pass-Through Term concept Cost per Request The part of the cost of serving one unit that is paid to a third party per transaction, which infrastructure optimisation cannot reduce and which eventually decides whether unit cost keeps falling.
Path Exit Rate Golden Path Abandonment Rate, Step Abandonment Rate metric Paved Road & Golden Path The share of journeys along a supported path that stop at each step, which tells a platform team where teams are forced off the road rather than merely how many ended up off it.
Path MTU Discovery PMTUD concept Network Troubleshooting The mechanism by which a sender discovers the largest packet size a path supports, and a common cause of connections that establish and then hang.
Path MTU Discovery Failure MTU Black Hole, PMTUD Blackhole concept Network Troubleshooting Large packets silently discarded because the ICMP messages that would report the size limit are blocked - producing the signature "small requests work, large transfers hang".
Pattern Inventory Audit Analogy Frequency Audit, Prior Case Count practice Pattern Recognition Counting which prior cases you argued from across your own last twenty written decisions, to find the analogy you apply too often before it costs a design - a frequency measurement rather than a check of one p…
Pattern Overuse concept Design Patterns Applying a design pattern where the problem it solves does not exist, adding indirection and vocabulary without benefit.
Pattern Recognition practice Pattern Recognition Recognising that a new problem is an instance of a known one — the main source of an experienced architect's speed, and of their characteristic errors.
Pattern Scope Discipline Apply the Pattern to a Use Case, Not the System concept CQRS The rule that heavyweight data patterns - CQRS, event sourcing, materialised read models - belong to the specific part of a domain that needs them, never to a whole product.
Paved Road Golden Path practice Enterprise Architecture A supported, opinionated default way to build and run a service, made easy enough that teams choose it rather than being required to.
Paved Road Telemetry practice Platform Telemetry Instrumenting the platform's own usage — where teams succeed, where they stall, where they leave — so its roadmap is driven by evidence.
Paved Roads Golden Path pattern Paved Roads A supported, opinionated default path that is the easiest way to do the right thing — governance by convenience rather than by mandate.
Payload Compression Trade-off concept Network Performance Tuning The exchange of CPU time for reduced transfer time, which is favourable on constrained networks and harmful on fast local ones.
PCI DSS Scope Reduction practice PCI-DSS Scoping Deliberately limiting which systems handle cardholder data so that the audited estate is small, since every in-scope system carries the full control burden.
Peak Event Readiness practice Peak Event Readiness Preparing for a known, dated, high-stakes traffic event — where the discipline is as much organisational as technical.
Peak Multiple Headroom Multiple, Peak-Over-Peak Factor metric Estimation The factor by which a system is sized above its last observed peak - a fast planning heuristic that silently assumes the population generating load is the population you served before.
Peak Readiness Rehearsal Pre-Event Verification, Scheduled Peak Drill practice Peak Event Readiness The set of pre-peak actions and verifications - warm caches, warm pools, confirmed dependency headroom, a change freeze, a rehearsed shedding path - without which correct capacity still fails.
Per-Dependency Concurrency Limit Dependency Semaphore, Downstream Bulkhead pattern Bulkheads & Isolation A hard cap on in-flight calls to a specific downstream, which bounds the damage a slow dependency can do regardless of how slow it becomes - more reliable than a circuit breaker because it needs no detection.
Per-Device Series Budget Fleet Series Count, Device-Tag Cardinality Limit metric Device Telemetry at Scale The number of distinct metric time series a fleet creates - series per device multiplied by device count - which decides observability cost long before data volume does, and which determines whether per-device…
Per-Entity Migration State Record-Level Ownership Flag, Entity Migration Flag, Per-Row Routing State pattern Coexistence Patterns A field on each business entity naming the system currently authoritative for it, which makes the unit of migration one row rather than one capability - so traffic moves in nameable cohorts and rolls back by u…
Per-Record Tenancy Record-Level Ownership, Attribute-Based Tenancy, Cross-Org Data Ownership pattern Authorization Attaching the owning organisation to each record rather than to its container, so that data shared across tenant boundaries can still be governed, exported, retained and deleted according to the policy of whoe…
Percentile Latency metric Latency Latency expressed as the value below which a given proportion of requests fall, used because averages conceal the behaviour that users notice.
Performance Budget practice Performance Budgets A stated numeric limit on a performance characteristic, enforced automatically so that regressions fail a build rather than accumulating.
Performance Budget Enforcement practice Web Performance Budgets A stated limit on bundle size or a timing metric that fails a build when exceeded, which is what turns performance from a periodic project into a constraint.
Performance Budget for Backends practice Performance Budgets A latency or resource allowance allocated per component of a request path, so that the end-to-end target is composed rather than hoped for.
Performance Test Design practice Performance Test Design Constructing a load test whose result predicts production behaviour rather than merely producing numbers.
Performance versus Cost concept Performance vs Cost The trade between latency and spend — where headroom is the mechanism and high utilisation is the false economy.
Permission Boundary concept Identity & Access Management A policy limiting the maximum permissions an identity can have, used so that the ability to create roles does not become the ability to grant unlimited privilege.
Persisted Query pattern GraphQL Registering allowed queries in advance and having clients send an identifier instead of the query text.
Personally Identifiable Information PII, Personal Data concept Security Architecture Data relating to an identifiable person — a category far broader than name and address, and the trigger for most regulatory obligation.
Phishing-Resistant Authentication Origin-Bound Authentication, Unphishable MFA pattern Authentication Authentication whose response cannot be replayed at a site other than the one it was produced for, because the authenticator signs the requesting origin rather than releasing a secret the user could pass on.
Physical Latency Floor Speed-of-Light Budget, Propagation Floor metric First-Principles Reasoning The minimum achievable round-trip time between two locations set by propagation in fibre - roughly 1 ms per 100 km each way - which no provider, protocol or cache can improve on for a request that must reach t…
Physical World Failure Mode concept Physical-World Failure Modes The failure classes that only exist once software controls or observes physical equipment, where the system cannot be restarted and the consequences are not confined to data.
Pilot Light pattern Disaster Recovery A disaster recovery posture where core data is continuously replicated and minimal infrastructure runs, with the rest provisioned only on failover.
Pinterest's MySQL Sharding case-study Data Architecture Pinterest sharded MySQL by embedding the shard ID inside every primary key, making any object's location computable from its ID alone with no lookup service.
Pipeline Anomaly Detection practice Data Observability Monitoring row counts, distributions, freshness and schema for unexplained change, because data pipelines fail silently far more often than they error.
Pipeline Change Coverage Change Denominator, Measured Change Share metric Flow Metrics The share of changes reaching production that the delivery pipeline actually measures - the denominator that decides whether elite delivery metrics describe the system or only the part of it that happens to be…
Pipeline Credential Scope OIDC Federation for CI, Workload Identity for CI practice Pipeline Secrets Granting a pipeline short-lived, narrowly scoped identity for exactly the environment it is deploying to, rather than a long-lived key.
Pipeline Fan-Out pattern Pipeline Architecture Splitting independent verification work to run in parallel, bounded by what genuinely has no ordering dependency on anything else.
Pipeline Feedback Latency Commit-to-Verdict Time, CI Feedback Time metric CI/CD The time from pushing a change to knowing whether it passed, which sets the batch size engineers choose and therefore the size of every review, deploy and rollback.
Pipeline Orchestration practice ETL & ELT Coordinating the execution of data tasks by dependency rather than by clock, with retries, backfill and observability built in.
Pipeline Stage Contract concept Delivery & Release Engineering What each pipeline stage promises the next — an artifact of a stated shape plus a specific claim about it that has been verified.
Pipes and Filters pattern Pipes and Filters Decomposing processing into independent stages connected by data channels, so each stage can be developed, tested, scaled and restarted alone.
Pipes and Filters pattern Architecture Patterns Decomposing processing into independent steps connected by channels, each transforming its input and passing it on.
Pivot Transaction concept Sagas & Compensation The step in a saga after which the transaction can no longer be cancelled — everything before it is compensatable, everything after it is retriable until it succeeds.
Platform Abstraction Level concept Abstraction Level Choice How far a platform hides the underlying infrastructure, and the leak-versus-flexibility trade it makes at that height.
Platform Adoption metric Platform Adoption The proportion of eligible teams and workloads actually using the platform, treated as the platform's primary product metric.
Platform API concept Platform APIs The programmatic contract through which teams consume platform capabilities, and the thing that must stay stable while everything behind it changes.
Platform API Deprecation practice Platform API Deprecation Retiring a platform capability that other teams depend on, with the migration burden treated as the platform's problem rather than theirs.
Platform as a Product practice Platform as a Product Running an internal platform with users, a roadmap and adoption metrics — because a platform that must be mandated is one that has not earned its use.
Platform as a Product practice Platform as a Product Running an internal platform with the disciplines of a product — voluntary adoption, user research, documentation and a roadmap — rather than as a mandated standard.
Platform as Product practice Platform Funding Running an internal platform with a product manager, a roadmap, identified users and measured adoption, rather than as a project with an end date.
Platform Bypass Signal Adoption as Feedback, Voluntary Platform Use concept Platform as a Product Teams routing around an internal platform read as a product signal about the platform's fitness, not as a compliance failure to be solved with a mandate.
Platform Contract concept Platform APIs The platform's promise to its consumers about interface stability, behaviour and support, treated with the same seriousness as an external API.
Platform Engineering concept Platform Engineering Building internal products that reduce the cognitive load on delivery teams — with self-service as the property that separates it from a service desk.
Platform Funding Model concept Platform Funding How internal platform work is paid for, which determines what the platform optimises for and whether it survives a budget cycle.
Platform Lifecycle Constraint concept Mobile App Architecture The operating system's rules about when your process runs, which are not negotiable and invalidate most assumptions carried over from server code.
Platform SLO metric Platform SLOs A published reliability and performance objective the platform commits to for the teams that depend on it.
Platform Team Product Model practice Platform Teams Running an internal platform team with product management disciplines — users, roadmap, support, metrics — rather than as an infrastructure function.
Platform Teams concept Platform Teams Teams providing self-service internal capability to reduce the cognitive load on delivery teams — distinguished from a service desk by self-service.