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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
Release Tarball Divergence Archive-Repository Gap, Distributed-Source Divergence concept Supply-Chain Provenance The gap between a project's reviewed source repository and the source archive that downstream actually builds, which is a trust boundary most supply-chain controls assume does not exist.
Release Toggle Temporary Feature Flag, Rollout Flag, Deploy-Release Decoupler pattern Feature Flags A short-lived flag that decouples deploying code from releasing a feature, intended to be removed within weeks - and the category responsible for almost all accumulated feature-flag debt when it is not.
Release Train pattern Deployment Strategies A fixed-cadence release where whatever is ready by the departure time ships, and whatever is not waits for the next one.
Release Unit Promotable Set, Deployment Bundle concept Delivery & Release Engineering The complete set of inputs a promotion must move together - artefact digest, configuration revision, flag defaults and schema version - because promoting only the artefact leaves the rest as untested variables.
Reliability Headroom metric Capacity Planning The gap between provisioned capacity and the load that would be carried after the largest planned failure, measured under peak conditions.
Reliability versus Complexity concept Reliability vs Complexity Mechanisms added for reliability introduce their own failure modes — so past a point, more machinery makes a system less reliable.
Relocate Disposition Seventh R, Hypervisor-Level Migration, Cluster Relocation pattern The Six Rs The migration treatment that moves a hypervisor-managed estate to a hypervisor-compatible target with the application and operating system unchanged, so the unit of work is the cluster rather than the machine …
Remote Module Loading pattern Module Federation Importing code from another application's build at runtime, with the versioning, availability and failure questions that a normal import does not have.
Remote Resolvability Issues Fixable Without a Visit, Field Visit Rate metric Fleet Management The proportion of device issues that can be diagnosed and resolved without a physical visit - a design-time property that determines the operating cost of a fleet for its entire life.
Render Location Decision concept Rendering Strategies Where HTML is produced — build time, server, edge or browser — chosen per route by how personalised and how cacheable that route is.
Rendering Strategy SSR, CSR, SSG, ISR concept Rendering Strategies The decision about where and when HTML is produced — build time, server request time, or in the browser — which drives performance, cost and complexity.
Replaceability Test Swap Test, Modularity Evidence practice Modularity The evidence-based check for whether a boundary is real - not how many services exist, but whether one implementation could be swapped without touching the others, and whether it ever has been.
Replatform practice Replatforming Moving a workload with targeted changes that capture most of the platform's benefit without redesigning the application.
Replay Determinism Projection Purity, Deterministic Fold concept Event Sourcing The property that folding an event log through a projection handler yields the same state every time it is run, which is what makes an event log rebuildable rather than merely stored.
Replay Effect Suppression Separating Computation From Effects, Safe Reprocessing practice Backfill & Reprocessing Separating a stream processor's computation from the components that act on its output, so that reprocessing a month of data does not re-send a month of notifications.
Replay Pipeline pattern Kappa vs Lambda A single processing path that produces both live and historical results by re-running the same code over retained input, replacing the two-path Lambda arrangement.
Replica Lag Routing Read Routing, Primary Pinning practice Replication Deciding, per read, whether it may be served by an asynchronous replica - the operational discipline that makes read scaling safe.
Replication concept Replication Keeping copies of data on multiple machines for availability, read scaling and locality — and the lag that comes with all three.
Replication in Practice Read Replicas, Multi-Primary pattern Replication Copying data across nodes for availability and read capacity, and the lag that turns into user-visible bugs if session guarantees are not designed in.
Replication Lag metric Replication How far behind a replica is, measured in time or in log position — the quantity that determines how stale a replica read can be.
Replication Slot Retention Slot Lag, WAL Retention Pressure concept CDC to Stream The write-ahead log a database must keep because a change-data-capture consumer has not yet confirmed it, which turns a slow or stopped CDC pipeline into a disk-space failure on the primary database.
Report Migration Inventory practice Warehouse Migration The enumerated list of every report, extract and downstream consumer of the legacy warehouse, with usage evidence, which is what makes the migration finite.
Reported Versus Desired State pattern Digital Twin Holding two representations of a device — what it last said it was, and what it should be — with the gap between them driving reconciliation.
Representative Device Measurement Measure Where Users Are, Field Distribution practice Real User Monitoring Measuring performance on the devices and networks the audience actually uses, and on the distribution rather than the median - because a build agent and a median user both represent nobody in particular.
Reprocessing Window concept Backfill & Reprocessing How far back a pipeline can be replayed, set by the shortest retention anywhere along the path rather than by intent.
Repurchase Displacement Cost Buy-Instead-Of-Build Migration Load, SaaS Substitution Overhead concept The Six Rs The data migration, process change, integration rebuild and customisation retirement that replacing a bespoke application with a purchased product creates, none of which appears in the licence comparison that …
Request Coalescing Request Collapsing, Single-Flight practice Caching Strategies Collapsing many concurrent requests for the same missing resource into a single upstream fetch, with the rest waiting on its result.
Request-Based and Window-Based SLI metric SLI, SLO & SLA Two ways of computing the same reliability target — counting good events, or counting good time windows — which produce materially different numbers.
Request-Reply and Fire-and-Forget concept Sync vs Async The two interaction shapes available between components, differing in whether the caller waits for a result and therefore in whether availability compounds.
Request-Scoped Identity Principal-Bound Response, Per-Request Ownership Check pattern Secure API Design Binding every piece of shared mutable state a response is assembled from to the principal who asked for it, so that a bug in pooling or caching produces an error rather than another customer's data.
Requirements to Constraints practice Requirements to Constraints The translation step where a stated business wish becomes a number that rules designs out.
Reranking Cross-Encoder Reranking pattern Reranking Retrieving a wide candidate set cheaply, then reordering it with a more expensive model that scores each candidate against the query directly.
Research Skills practice Research & Evaluation Finding out what is true about a technology or a problem, efficiently and without being misled by marketing or by other people's context.
Reservation Ledger Stock Ledger, Reserve-Then-Commit pattern Transactions & Isolation Modelling stock as an append-only sequence of reservations, releases and allocations rather than as a mutable count - so the number has a history, can be reconciled, and does not become a single point of contention.
Reserved and Committed Capacity Savings Plan, Committed Use Discount practice Reserved & Committed Capacity Trading a commitment to spend for a substantial discount, where the risk is committing to an architecture you are about to change.
Residual Caller Tail Deprecation Long Tail, Last Caller Problem practice Platform API Deprecation The handful of callers left at the end of a deprecation who will not move on their own, and the mechanisms that clear them so the removal date holds instead of slipping.
Resilience Testing practice Resilience Testing Verifying that failure-handling behaves as designed — a category of testing distinct from functional and load testing, and usually absent.
Resource Modelling practice REST Design Expressing an API as nouns with a consistent hierarchy rather than as verbs, so URLs are predictable and methods carry the semantics.
Resource Requests and Limits concept Kubernetes The declared minimum a container is guaranteed (request) and the maximum it may consume (limit) — the two numbers that determine scheduling, packing and throttling.
Resource Saturation Audit practice Bottleneck Analysis A systematic checklist for locating resource bottlenecks by examining utilisation, saturation and errors for every resource in the system.
REST RESTful API protocol API & Integration An architectural style for APIs built on resources identified by URLs, manipulated with uniform HTTP methods, and stateless requests.
Restatement Record Correction Record, Submission Versioning practice Regulatory Reporting Pipelines Preserving the original submission alongside its correction, with the reason and the difference explicable - so that a restated figure strengthens the audit trail instead of destroying it.
Restore Drill practice Backup Strategies A scheduled, timed exercise of restoring from backup into a clean environment — the only thing that converts a backup from a hope into a control.
Restore Granularity Recovery Unit, Restore Scope concept RTO & RPO The smallest unit a recovery procedure can return without disturbing everything stored alongside it, which sets the real recovery time for any incident that affects a subset of the data.
Restore Verification practice DR Testing Periodically performing a real restore from backup and validating the result, as the only evidence that a recovery capability exists.
Restore-Only Rollback No-Downgrade Path, Backup-Dependent Reversal concept Rollback & Forward Fix The state of a system that cannot be returned to its previous version by deploying it, so the only reversal available is restoring from backup - which converts a minutes-long rollback into a recovery operation…
Resync Horizon Tombstone Retention Window, Full Resync Threshold concept Sync & Conflict Resolution The age of the oldest change a server can still describe as a delta - beyond which a returning client must take a full snapshot or it will silently keep records that were deleted.
Retail Peak: Designing for Black Friday Black Friday Readiness case-study Peak Event Readiness A retailer's annual peak can be an order of magnitude above normal, arrives in minutes, and cannot be rescheduled — which makes it a distinct engineering discipline.
Retention and Purge practice Retention & Purge Deleting data when its lawful or business purpose has ended, and being able to prove that it happened.
Retention Clock Retention Trigger Event, Governing Event concept Records Retention & Legal Hold The business event from which a retention period is measured - not the row's creation - which must be recomputed rather than stored because late events move it.
Retention Cost metric Streaming Cost The storage bill for keeping a log replayable, which is set by retention multiplied by throughput multiplied by the replication factor.
Retire-First Portfolio Bias Cheapest Sufficient Option, Retire and Retain Default practice The Six Rs Assigning every application the cheapest modernisation option that satisfies the business driver, with a written justification required for anything more - which resolves most portfolios into retire and retain…
Retrieval Evaluation practice LLM Evaluation Measuring whether the right context was retrieved, separately from whether the answer was good, because the two failures need different fixes.
Retrieval Grounding Grounded Generation concept RAG Architecture Constraining a model's answer to content retrieved from an authoritative corpus, with citations and an abstention path - so that output quality becomes a retrieval problem rather than a model problem.
Retrieval Pipeline Stages pattern RAG Architecture The stages that turn a user question into grounded context — query processing, retrieval, reranking and assembly — each independently tunable.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation RAG pattern AI-Era Architecture Retrieving relevant documents at query time and putting them in the model's context, so answers are grounded in your data rather than in training data.
Retrieval-Cost Trap Archival Access Cost, Cold Tier Scan Penalty concept Storage Costs The failure where moving data to an archival tier saves storage cost and a scanning access pattern then spends more on retrieval than the tiering saved.
Retrieval-Generation Separation Evaluate Retrieval Independently, Two-Stage Debugging practice RAG Architecture Measuring whether the correct passage was retrieved, separately from whether the answer was correct - the single diagnostic that turns unfalsifiable RAG debugging into a specific measurable defect.
Retry Budget Retry Ratio Limit, Adaptive Retry Throttling pattern Retries & Backoff A global cap on retries as a proportion of total requests, which bounds retry amplification during broad failures in a way that per-request retry counts cannot.
Retry-After protocol Rate Limiting A response header telling a client how long to wait before retrying, turning a rejection into actionable guidance.