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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
Profiling practice Profiling Attributing resource consumption to specific code paths — the tool for "why is this slow" once you know where.
Profiling and Optimisation practice Profiling & Optimisation The discipline of measuring before changing, optimising the dominant term, and stopping when the objective is met.
Progress-Based Liveness Are-You-Making-Progress Check, Beyond Heartbeats practice Leader Election Detecting a leader or worker that is alive but not advancing, by checking whether work is progressing rather than whether the process responds.
Progressive Media Materialisation Lazy Transcoding, On-Demand Rendition pattern Content Delivery Networks Generating only a baseline media rendition on upload and producing higher-quality variants on first demand - trading a slower first view of unpopular content for a large reduction in transcoding and storage cost.
Progressive Rollout Wave Deployment, Staged Rollout practice Multi-Region Rollout Deploying across regions or cells in ordered waves with soak time between them, so a defect is contained to the earliest wave.
Progressive Shutdown Graceful Decommissioning, Staged Retirement practice Decommissioning Retiring a system through reversible stages - read-only, then blocked, then stopped, then removed - so each stage surfaces remaining consumers safely instead of breaking them.
Projection pattern CQRS The process that consumes changes from the write side and maintains a read model, and the component where most CQRS bugs live.
Projection Rebuild Budget Read Model Rebuild Time, Rebuild Service Level Objective metric CQRS The measured wall-clock time to rebuild a read model from scratch, treated as a service level objective, because it bounds how quickly a projection defect can be corrected and therefore whether CQRS is reversi…
Prompt Injection concept AI-Era Architecture An attack in which text from an untrusted source is interpreted by the model as instructions rather than as data.
Prompt Injection Defence practice Prompt Injection Defence Defending systems where untrusted content reaches a language model that can take actions — a problem of privilege, not of filtering.
Prompt Registry Prompt Management tool AI-Era Architecture A versioned store of production prompts with their model bindings, parameters and evaluation results, so a prompt change is a reviewable, traceable, reversible deployment.
Prompt Regression Suite practice Prompt & Version Management A set of test cases with expected properties, run against a prompt on every change, to detect quality regressions before deployment.
Prompt Versioning practice Prompt & Version Management Treating prompts as versioned, reviewed, tested and deployable artifacts rather than as strings edited in place.
Prop Interface Stability concept Component Contracts The commitment a component makes about its props, slots, events and emitted structure — including the parts consumers depend on that were never intended as interface.
Property-Based Testing Generative Testing, QuickCheck-Style Testing tool Test Architecture Strategy Asserting invariants that must hold for all inputs, then having the framework generate many inputs to try to break them.
Protected Allocation Ring-Fenced Capacity, Non-Negotiated Investment practice Portfolio Prioritisation A fixed share of capacity reserved for a category of work that loses every individual comparison against features - because the aggregate outcome would otherwise be nobody's decision.
Protocol Buffers Protobuf protocol gRPC Transport A binary serialisation format with a schema definition language, generating typed code and enforcing explicit compatibility rules through field numbering.
Provenance Parity History Parity, Build-Path Parity concept Environment Parity Similarity between environments in how they were built and changed over time - the parity dimension that decides whether a rehearsal transfers, and the one that manifests and version numbers cannot show.
Provider Capability Matrix Integration Support Grid, Honest Capability Declaration practice Integration Patterns An explicit per-provider record of which normalised capabilities are genuinely supported, which are approximated and which are unavailable - published as a product feature rather than kept as internal documentation.
Provider Exit Plan practice Exit & Concentration Risk A documented and tested plan for moving a workload off a provider, whose credibility is measured by what has actually been rehearsed rather than described.
Provider Verification practice Contract Testing The provider-side stage that replays every consumer's recorded expectations against the real implementation.
Provisional Result Restatement, Unsettled Aggregate concept Watermarks & Late Data An aggregate emitted before its window is definitively complete, which may be corrected when late events arrive - correct behaviour that destroys trust when it is not made visible.
Provisioned vs Serverless Capacity concept Cloud Databases Paying for a fixed database size continuously, versus paying for capacity consumed with automatic scaling — a crossover decision driven by duty cycle.
Provisioning Reconciliation Orphan Sweep, Convergent Provisioning practice Self-Service Provisioning Running a scheduled comparison between what a self-service platform intended to create and what actually exists in the cloud account, so partial failures become a tracked number rather than an invoice surprise.
Provisioning Self-Service practice Self-Service Provisioning Teams obtaining infrastructure without a ticket, within bounds that make the request safe by construction rather than by review.
Proxy Buffering concept Reverse Proxies Whether a reverse proxy accumulates a response before forwarding it, which protects the backend from slow clients but breaks streaming.
Pseudo-Locale Testing Pseudo-Localisation, Accented Locale practice Internationalisation Rendering the interface with algorithmically transformed strings - lengthened, accented, direction-reversed - to expose internationalisation defects before any translation exists.
Pseudonymisation practice Pseudonymisation Replacing identifying fields with a reference so records cannot be attributed to a person without separately held additional information.
Public Incident Narrative Public Postmortem practice Written Communication An externally published account of an outage that transfers the diagnostic search rather than a conclusion - the timeline that was read, the hypotheses that were wrong and the practice gap that allowed it.
Publish-Subscribe Pub/Sub pattern Publish/Subscribe One publication delivered to many subscribers, with the publisher unaware of who they are — and the fan-out problem that comes with it.
Publish/Subscribe Pub/Sub pattern Architecture Patterns A messaging pattern where each published message is delivered to every interested subscriber, rather than to one competing worker.
Purpose Binding Purpose Metadata, Use Limitation Tagging practice Lawful Basis & Purpose Limitation Recording with the data the purpose it was collected for, and carrying that constraint through derivation, so a later use can be checked against what was agreed at collection.
Purpose Limitation Use Constraint, Purpose Binding, Secondary Use Control concept Lawful Basis & Purpose Limitation The requirement that personal data collected for one stated purpose is not used for another, which architecture enforces by binding a purpose to every dataset and evaluating it at the point of use rather than …
Purpose-Based Access pattern Data Access Models Granting access for a stated and recorded purpose rather than by role alone, which is what several data protection regimes actually require.
Push Token Decay Stale Registration Token, Push Target Rot concept Push & Background Work The steady accumulation of push targets that no longer reach a device - which inflates fan-out cost and makes delivery metrics describe a list rather than an audience.
Quality and Testing Strategy practice Testing & Quality Architecture How an organisation obtains confidence that changes are safe — a portfolio decision about where to spend limited verification effort.
Quality Attribute Scenario QA Scenario, Testable NFR practice Quality Attributes A six-part template that turns a vague quality goal into something you can measure and argue about.
Quality Dimension Threshold metric Data Quality Dimensions The stated numeric level at which a dataset is fit for its purpose on a given quality dimension, plus what happens when it is not met.
Quality Gate Threshold practice Quality Gates The specific numeric bar a change must clear, and the perverse incentives it creates when chosen carelessly.
Quality Proxy Metric Implicit Quality Signal, Behavioural Quality Indicator metric AI Observability A continuously available production signal that moves when answer quality moves - abstention rate, regeneration rate, escalation rate - used to page someone in the hours before a labelled evaluation could ever run.
Quality Ratchet Boy Scout Rule, Improvement Ratchet practice Refactoring An automated rule ensuring a codebase can only improve on a chosen dimension - new code meets the standard, existing code improves when touched, and regression is blocked.
Quantified Risk Estimate practice Risk Assessment Methods Expressing a risk as a probability distribution over financial loss rather than as a colour, which makes risks comparable and mitigations arguable on cost.
Quasi-Identifier Set Indirect Identifiers, Re-identification Vector concept Pseudonymisation The combination of attributes that singles out an individual even after direct identifiers are removed - which is why deleting names and ids does not anonymise a dataset, and why free text and behavioural hist…
Query Cost Analysis Query Complexity Limiting, Cost-Based Rate Limiting practice GraphQL Computing the resource cost of a client-specified query before executing it, so that an API which lets clients define their own requests cannot be asked to do unbounded work.
Query Federation pattern Data Virtualisation Executing a single query across several underlying systems without moving the data, and the performance ceiling that pushdown determines.
Query Optimisation practice Query Optimisation Making the database do less work — usually by removing round trips and rows rather than by rewriting clever SQL.
Query Plan Execution Plan, EXPLAIN concept Data Architecture The database's chosen strategy for executing a query, and the first thing to look at when one is slow.
Query Plan Regression concept Database Performance A sudden latency increase caused by the database optimiser choosing a different execution plan for an unchanged query, typically after statistics or data volume change.
Query Surface Volatility concept SQL vs NoSQL How fast a product invents query shapes it did not have before - the workload fact that decides whether a purpose-built physical layout or a general query planner is the cheaper bet.
Query-Based CDC Polling CDC, Timestamp-Based CDC pattern Change Data Capture Detecting changes by repeatedly querying for rows modified since the last run — simple, universally available, and lossy in specific ways.
Queue Length Estimation practice Little's Law Using the relationship between arrival rate, residence time and items in the system to size pools, predict backlogs and sanity-check capacity claims.
Queue Time Attribution metric Flow Metrics Splitting elapsed lead time into work and waiting, and naming which queue each wait sat in.
Queueing Delay concept Queueing Theory The time a request spends waiting rather than being served, which rises non-linearly as utilisation approaches capacity.
QUIC HTTP/3 protocol HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 & HTTP/3 A transport built on UDP that provides streams, encryption and congestion control, removing TCP's head-of-line blocking and reducing connection setup latency.
Quorum concept Consensus Protocols The minimum number of replicas that must respond for an operation to be considered committed, sized so that any read set and any write set must overlap.
Radar Ring Semantics practice Technology Radar The meaning attached to each ring of a technology radar, which determines whether it guides decisions or merely lists opinions.
Radio Wake Budget Transactions Per Day Budget, Wake Count Budget metric Constrained Protocols The number of radio wakes a device can afford per day at its target battery life - the planning number that decides protocol and batching choices, because energy is spent per transmission rather than per byte.
Raft protocol Consensus Protocols A consensus algorithm designed to be understandable, decomposing agreement into leader election, log replication and safety.
Rate Limit Design Token Bucket, Sliding Window practice Rate Limiting The algorithm, scope and response behaviour that determine whether throttling protects the service and treats callers fairly.
Rate Limiting pattern API & Integration Bounding how many requests a caller may make in a window, to protect capacity and enforce fair use.