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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
Platform Telemetry practice Platform Telemetry Instrumentation of the platform itself — who uses which capability, how long it takes and where it fails — used as product evidence, not just operations.
Platform User Research practice Platform Engineering Treating engineers as users whose actual behaviour is observed rather than assumed, which is what separates a platform from a set of shared tools.
Pod concept Kubernetes The smallest deployable unit in Kubernetes — one or more containers that share a network namespace, storage volumes and a lifecycle, scheduled together on one node.
Point of No Return Rollback Horizon, Commit Point practice Cutover Planning The step in a migration after which rollback would lose data or state - identified in advance, with a named authoriser and a stated recovery plan beyond it.
Point-in-Time Correctness As-Of Join, Temporal Correctness, Leakage Prevention concept Semantic Layer Retrieving each feature's value as it was at the moment of the event rather than its current value, which is what prevents a model from training on information that did not exist yet.
Point-in-Time Reconstruction As-At Reporting, Reproducible Submission practice Regulatory Reporting Pipelines The ability to regenerate a past report from the data and rules as they stood then - without which a regenerated figure differs from the submitted one and the difference cannot be explained.
Point-in-Time Recovery PITR concept Backup Strategies Restoring a database to any moment within a retention window by replaying transaction logs onto a base backup, rather than only to a snapshot boundary.
Poison Message concept Dead Letter Handling A record that a consumer cannot process and cannot skip, which halts its partition entirely until someone intervenes.
Policy as Code Compliance as Code, Automated Control, Executable Policy practice Architecture Compliance Checks Expressing controls as executable rules evaluated automatically against real system state, so that compliance is demonstrated continuously over the whole population rather than asserted in a document and sampl…
Policy as Code Guardrail Policy practice Policy as Code Expressing organisational rules as executable code evaluated automatically in pipelines and at admission, instead of as prose enforced by review.
Policy Bypass Surface Enforcement Gap, Derived-Object Leak concept Row & Column-Level Security The set of objects and paths through which data protected by a row or column policy can be read without that policy being evaluated - typically derived objects refreshed under a privileged identity.
Policy Decision Point PDP, Authorization Service, Policy Engine pattern Zero Trust The component that evaluates an authorisation question and returns a decision, kept separate from the enforcement points that ask, so policy can change without redeploying every service.
Policy Failure Mode Admission Fail-Open, Fail-Closed Policy concept Policy as Code What an admission-time policy engine does when it cannot be reached - fail open and allow the change, or fail closed and block it - decided per policy class rather than globally, because a uniform answer is wr…
Polyglot Persistence concept Polyglot Persistence Using different storage engines for different workloads within one system — justified by genuine workload divergence, and frequently not.
Port and Adapter pattern Hexagonal Architecture An interface defined by the application expressing what it needs, paired with an implementation that connects it to a specific technology.
Port Exhaustion concept NAT & Egress Running out of available source ports for outbound connections through a NAT device, causing new connections to fail while everything appears healthy.
Portability Tax Portability Premium, Cloud-Neutrality Cost concept Multi-Cloud The recurring cost of keeping a workload provider-neutral - the managed-service premium forgone, the lowest-common-denominator ceiling and the platform headcount - which routinely exceeds the one-off migration…
Portfolio Assessment Matrix practice Application Portfolio Management Plotting each application on business value against technical quality, producing a disposition for every system in the estate.
Postmortems Incident Review, Blameless Postmortem practice Postmortems Structured learning from an incident, conducted so that the truth is obtainable — which requires that telling it is safe.
Power-Interest Grid practice Stakeholder Analysis A classification of stakeholders by their influence over a decision and their level of concern with it, used to allocate communication effort deliberately.
Pragmatism practice Meta-Skills Preferring the simplest architecture that satisfies the requirements, and treating additional structure as a cost that must be justified.
Pre-Mortem practice Failure Thinking An exercise in which a team imagines a project has already failed and explains why, surfacing risks that a forward-looking risk assessment misses.
Pre-Provisioned Capacity pattern Static Stability Running capacity that is already in place to absorb a failure, rather than depending on a control plane to create it during the failure.
Pre-Read Alignment Blocker Pre-Socialisation, Objection Absorption practice Facilitation Speaking to the two or three people whose objection would block a decision before circulating the proposal, so the session confirms a decision rather than discovering a conflict.
Pre-Scaling Scheduled Scaling, Warm Provisioning, Capacity Staging practice Peak Event Readiness Provisioning capacity in advance of a known event rather than relying on autoscaling, because the arrival spike at a scheduled moment is faster than any reactive control loop can respond to.
Pre-Scaling Scheduled Scaling, Predictive Scaling practice Autoscaling Provisioning capacity before demand arrives, based on a forecast or a known event, because autoscaling cannot respond faster than its provisioning loop.
Precondition Audit Pattern Fit Check, Applicability Test, Assumption Check practice First-Principles Reasoning Explicitly stating the conditions a pattern assumes and checking each against your situation - which is where pattern matching becomes judgement rather than recall.
Precondition Check Pattern Assumption Test, Does This Fit practice First-Principles Reasoning Testing whether a problem's conditions match the assumptions a familiar pattern encodes - the ten-minute exercise that separates useful pattern reuse from cargo-culting.
Predicate Pushdown Filter Pushdown, Pushdown Optimisation concept Data Virtualisation Sending a filter to the layer that holds the data rather than fetching rows and filtering afterwards, which is the difference between reading megabytes and reading a table.
Predicate-Based Filtering pattern Row & Column-Level Security A policy that appends a filter to every query on a table based on who is asking, so one physical table serves many audiences safely.
Preparatory Refactoring Enabling Refactor, Prepare-Then-Change practice Refactoring Reshaping existing code first so the behaviour change that follows is small, keeping the two in separate commits with separate claims about what is true.
Presentation Skills practice Presentation Skills Presenting architecture so a specific audience can make a decision — which requires knowing which decision and adapting everything to it.
Presenting to Engineers practice Architecture Communication Presenting a design at the level of mechanism, including the alternatives rejected and the parts you are still unsure about.
Presenting to Executives practice Architecture Communication Leading with the decision and the business consequence, at a level of abstraction where technology names do not appear.
Preventive Control Placement concept Guardrails vs Gates Choosing where in the lifecycle a control acts — at authoring, at admission or after the fact — which determines both its strength and its cost.
Preventive Guardrail Policy as Prevention, Deny-by-Default Control practice Cloud Governance A control that makes a non-compliant action impossible, rather than detecting it afterwards and generating a ticket.
Primary-Key-Partitioned Upsert Upsert Partitioning Contract, Key-Routed Upsert pattern Real-Time Analytical Stores Routing every version of a record to one partition so a real-time store can resolve the latest value locally - which buys sub-second latest-value queries and fixes the partition count and key budget for the ta…
Prime Video's Move Back to a Monolith Prime Video VQA Rearchitecture case-study Architecture Patterns Amazon Prime Video consolidated a serverless, distributed audio/video monitoring service into a single process and reported a 90% cost reduction — the most-cited example of microservices being the wrong tool.
Principle Rationale practice Architecture Principles The stated reasoning and implications attached to an architecture principle, without which the principle cannot be applied to a case its authors did not foresee.
Principle Statement Format Statement-Rationale-Implication, Testable Principle practice Architecture Principles The four-part shape - statement, rationale, implications, exceptions - that turns an architecture principle from a preference into something that actually rules options out.
Prioritisation practice Prioritisation Choosing what to work on when everything is important — by leverage, constraint and irreversibility rather than by urgency.
Priority Load Shedding Tiered Shedding, Criticality-Based Shedding, Selective Degradation pattern Load Shedding Dropping traffic by declared business criticality under stress rather than uniformly or randomly, exploiting the fact that the highest-volume requests are usually the least valuable ones.
Priority Queueing pattern Load Shedding Classifying requests by business importance so that overload sheds the least valuable work first rather than an arbitrary slice.
Privacy by Design practice Privacy by Design Building data protection into the architecture from the first design decision rather than adding controls to a system already built.
Privacy Engineering practice Privacy Engineering Building systems whose privacy properties come from their structure rather than from policy documents.
Privacy Enhancing Technology PETs concept Privacy-Enhancing Technologies Techniques that allow useful computation over data without exposing the underlying records — differential privacy, secure multi-party computation, homomorphic encryption, federated learning.
Privacy Loss Accounting Budget Composition Tracking, Epsilon Accounting practice Privacy-Enhancing Technologies Tracking cumulative privacy loss across every statistic released from a dataset, because differential privacy's guarantee holds over the whole publication rather than per query - and once the budget is spent, …
Private Connectivity PrivateLink, Private Endpoint, Service Endpoint concept Private Connectivity Reaching a cloud or partner service over private address space rather than the public internet, without exposing the consumer's network in return.
Private Endpoint PrivateLink, VPC Endpoint concept Private Connectivity A private network address inside your VPC that reaches a managed service directly, without traversing the internet or a NAT gateway.
Private Set Intersection PSI, Private Join and Compute protocol Privacy-Enhancing Technologies A cryptographic protocol that lets two parties learn the size of - or an aggregate over - the overlap between their datasets without either learning the other's non-matching members.
Privilege Creep Access Accumulation, Permission Sprawl concept Identity & Access Management The gradual accumulation of access as people change roles without losing prior permissions, producing long-tenured staff with far more access than anyone intended.
Problem Details RFC 9457, RFC 7807 protocol API Error Handling A standard JSON structure for HTTP error responses, giving machine-readable type, human-readable detail, and room for extensions.
Process Manager pattern Orchestration vs Choreography A component that owns the state and sequencing of a multi-step business process, deciding what happens next in response to events.
Process Model concept Business Processes A representation of how work actually flows through an organisation, distinguished from a capability by describing sequence, actors and handoffs.
Process Ownership Gap Unowned Workflow, Orphaned Business Process concept Orchestration vs Choreography The condition in which every step of a multi-service process has an owning team but the process itself has none, so a stall produces no error, no deadline breach and no page.
Processor Instruction Boundary Controller-Processor Line, Own-Purpose Test concept Third-Party Risk The line at which a vendor stops acting only on your documented instructions and starts pursuing purposes of its own - which decides your lawful basis, your consent gating and your breach clock.
Producer Obligation concept Data Contracts What a data contract binds the producing team to do, and — crucially — what happens in their pipeline when they are about to break it.
Producer-Enforced Contract Contract That Fails the Build, Upstream Enforcement practice Data Contracts A data contract checked in the producing team's own pipeline, so a breaking change is blocked before it ships - without which the contract is documentation and the breakage is discovered downstream.
Product Thinking concept Product Thinking Treating what you build as something with users whose problems it must solve — applied to internal platforms as much as to customer-facing products.
Production Parity Gap concept Environment Parity The enumerated list of ways a pre-production environment differs from production, which is the list of defect classes it cannot catch.