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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
Software Bill of Materials SBOM tool Supply Chain Security A machine-readable inventory of every component and dependency in a piece of software, including transitive ones, used to answer exposure questions quickly.
Software Contract Tests practice Contract Tests Verifying an interaction between two components from both sides independently, so integration confidence does not require deploying both.
SOLID practice Software Architecture Five object-oriented design principles — single responsibility, open/closed, Liskov substitution, interface segregation, dependency inversion.
SOLID Principles concept SOLID Five object-design principles whose architectural value lies almost entirely in the last one — dependency inversion.
Solution Architecture concept Architecture Fundamentals The design of a specific system that satisfies a specific business problem under a specific set of constraints.
Source NAT SNAT, Masquerading concept NAT & Egress Rewriting the source address of outbound packets so that many private addresses share one public address, with a translation table mapping replies back.
Source Triangulation practice Research & Evaluation Confirming a technical claim from several independent sources of differing type, because most available material is marketing or an unrepresentative anecdote.
Southwest 2022: Legacy Software Meeting Its Design Limits Southwest Airlines Meltdown case-study Modernisation Business Case A crew scheduling system that worked adequately for routine disruption could not cope with a large-scale one, and the airline cancelled roughly 16,700 flights.
Span Attribute Budget Trace Attribute Discipline, Span Cardinality Budget practice Distributed Tracing A deliberate limit on how many spans a request emits and how many attributes each carries, set so that traces stay readable and affordable rather than complete.
Span Link Trace Link, Span Reference concept Distributed Tracing A pointer from one span to another span in a different trace, recording a causal relationship where no single enclosing parent exists - the mechanism that keeps batch jobs, fan-in consumers and delayed asynchr…
Spec-First Development Design-First practice API Documentation Writing and reviewing the API specification before implementing, so the contract is designed deliberately rather than emerging from code.
Speculative Abstraction Premature Abstraction, Anticipatory Design concept Design Patterns Structure added for variation that has not occurred - paying certain indirection now for a benefit that depends on a guess about the future.
Spend Control Gate Funding Gate, Investment Approval Control practice Paved Roads Architecture governance applied at the point money is committed rather than at design review, so the conversation happens while the decision is still reversible and the centre has actual authority.
Spike and Prototype practice Deciding Under Uncertainty A time-boxed experiment run to reduce uncertainty about a specific question, producing evidence rather than a component.
Spike Budget Price of Information, Information Purchase Test practice Research & Evaluation The arithmetic that decides whether to buy evidence before committing - comparing the full cost of an investigation against the probability of choosing wrong multiplied by what correcting it later would cost.
Split Brain concept Leader Election A partition in which two subsets of a cluster each believe they are authoritative, accepting conflicting writes that cannot afterwards be reconciled.
Split Vote concept Leader Election An election in which no candidate obtains a majority, so the term ends with no leader and the process must repeat.
Spot Capacity Preemptible, Interruptible Instances practice Spot & Interruptible Capacity Using a provider's spare capacity at a steep discount, in exchange for the provider being able to reclaim it at short notice.
Spotify Backstage: The Catalogue as a Product Backstage case-study Internal Developer Platform Spotify built a developer portal that unified service discovery, documentation, templates and tooling behind one interface, and open-sourced it.
Spotify Discover Weekly: Three Models, One Playlist Discover Weekly case-study ML Platform Spotify combined collaborative filtering, natural language processing and raw audio analysis because each covers the others' blind spots.
Spotify's Squad Model and Its Retrospective case-study Business Architecture The widely-copied Spotify model of squads, tribes, chapters and guilds was a snapshot that did not work as documented even at Spotify — a caution about importing organisational design.
Spotify: Trading Kafka Operations for a Managed Service Spotify Event Delivery case-study Managed vs Self-Managed Spotify moved its event delivery backbone from self-managed Kafka to a managed pub/sub service, choosing to buy back operational capacity rather than deepen expertise.
SQL Transformation Model concept Transformation Frameworks A named, versioned, tested SELECT statement that declares its own dependencies, turning transformation logic into reviewable software.
SQL vs NoSQL concept Architecture Decision-Making A choice driven by access patterns, consistency requirements and query flexibility — not by data volume, which is the reason usually given.
Stable Event Identity Immutable Event ID, Delivery Deduplication Key pattern Webhooks An event identifier that is identical across every delivery attempt of the same event - the single property that makes at-least-once delivery usable, and the one most often broken by regenerating the ID on retry.
Stacked Changes Stacked Diffs, Patch Series, Dependent Change Chain practice Branching Models Splitting one body of work into a chain of small dependent changes that each review and merge on their own, so branch lifetime is set by the size of a link rather than the size of the feature.
Stakeholder Analysis practice Stakeholder Analysis Identifying who has a stake in a decision, what each cares about, and what would make each object — before the design review rather than during it.
Stale While Revalidate pattern Client Caching & Data Layer Serving cached data immediately while fetching a fresh copy in the background, which makes an interface feel instant at the cost of a brief inconsistency.
Standard Change practice Change Management vs CD A pre-authorised, low-risk, repeatable change type that may be executed without going through a change advisory board.
Standardisation Blast Radius Monoculture Exposure, Standard Concentration concept Technology Standards The property that a technology standard concentrates exposure as well as capability - one flaw in the standardised component applies to the whole estate - which turns the ability to change it everywhere at sho…
Standards Lifecycle practice Technology Standards Managing technology standards through explicit states with review dates, so the standard set reflects current reality rather than past decisions.
Standing Credential Long-Lived Credential, Persistent Secret, Static Key concept Secrets Management A credential that remains valid indefinitely, so a single leak grants permanent access - the property that converts a small compromise into a large one, and the one a secrets manager does not fix.
Star Schema pattern Data Warehousing A dimensional model with one central fact table of measurements surrounded by denormalised dimension tables describing them.
State Time-to-Live State TTL, State Expiry practice Stateful Stream Processing An expiry policy on stream-processor state so that state size tracks the active key set rather than the accumulated history of everything the job has ever seen.
Stateful Packet Filtering concept Firewalls & Security Groups Filtering that tracks connection state, so return traffic for an allowed outbound connection is permitted automatically.
Stateful Stream Processing concept Stateful Stream Processing Stream computations that must remember information across events — aggregations, joins, deduplication, sessionisation — and the durability machinery that makes them recoverable.
Static Stability Fail Static, Configuration Inertia, Control-Plane Independence concept Cloud Architecture Designing a system so it continues operating correctly on its existing configuration during a failure, requiring no control-plane action to survive - because control planes are the part most likely to be unava…
Static Stability Stability Under Failure concept Static Stability A system that keeps working correctly in its current state when its control plane or dependencies become unavailable, rather than needing them to stay running.
Steady-State Hypothesis concept Chaos as a Test The measurable statement of normal behaviour that a chaos experiment predicts will hold while a fault is injected, without which the exercise is not a test.
Step-Up Authentication pattern Authentication Requiring stronger proof of identity at the moment a consequential action is attempted, rather than applying maximum friction to every session.
Steward Accountability practice Data Stewardship Making stewardship a defined role with time, authority and consequences, rather than a title added to somebody's existing job.
Stewardship Escalation Path Data Decision Route, Definition Arbitration Path practice Data Stewardship The named route and time limit by which a disagreement a steward cannot settle reaches someone entitled to decide it, without which stewardship produces opinions rather than rulings.
Stop Authority Halt Right, Andon Authority practice Handling Disagreement A named role's pre-agreed right to halt a running system alone, without consensus on the cause, so that a loss accumulating per minute is stopped before it is understood.
Storage Costs concept Storage Costs Storage is cheap per gigabyte and expensive in aggregate — controlled by retention and tiering rather than by unit price.
Storage Lifecycle Policy practice Storage Costs Automated rules that move objects between storage classes as they age, matching cost to the declining probability that data will be read.
Storage Tiering Lifecycle Management, Hot-Warm-Cold Storage practice Cloud Storage Placing objects in storage classes according to access probability, so cost tracks usage rather than volume.
Store-and-Forward Queue On-Device Send Queue, Deferred Send Buffer pattern Mobile App Architecture A durable queue on the device that accepts writes while the network is absent and drains them in order when it returns - with an explicit policy for what happens when it fills or an entry is rejected.
Strangler Facade pattern Strangler Fig The routing layer in front of a legacy system that decides, per capability, whether a request goes to the old implementation or the new one.
Strangler Fig pattern Strangler Fig Replacing a legacy system incrementally by routing individual capabilities to new implementations until nothing is left running on the old one.
Strangler Fig Strangler Pattern pattern Architecture Patterns Replacing a legacy system incrementally by routing individual capabilities to new implementations behind a facade, until nothing routes to the old system.
Strangler Fig Execution pattern Strangler Fig Incrementally replacing a legacy system by routing slices of functionality to new implementations behind a facade, until nothing routes to the original.
Strategic Sourcing Decision practice Build vs Buy A build-versus-buy decision framed around competitive differentiation and organisational capacity rather than a comparison of visible costs.
Stream Enrichment pattern Streaming Joins Attaching reference data to a stream by lookup against a materialised table rather than by joining two unbounded streams.
Stream Processing Frameworks tool Stream Processing Frameworks Engines that process unbounded data with managed state, windowing and fault tolerance — chosen by state and time semantics rather than by throughput.
Stream-Table Duality concept Stream-Table Duality The equivalence between a stream of changes and a table of current state, where each can be derived from the other.
Streaming Cost Model concept Streaming Cost The cost structure of an always-on streaming system, where compute runs continuously regardless of volume and cross-zone data movement is a major line item.
Streaming Data Architecture concept Streaming Data Processing unbounded data continuously, where the central problems are time semantics, lateness and state rather than throughput.
Streaming Join concept Streaming Joins Combining two streams, or a stream and a table, where the records to be joined may not arrive at the same time or in the same order.
Streaming Schema Evolution practice Streaming Schema Evolution Changing the shape of events in a topic that has multiple independently deployed producers and consumers, plus retained history that still has to be readable.
Streaming vs Batch Decision practice Streaming vs Batch Choosing between continuous and periodic processing based on the decision latency the business actually requires, not on the appeal of real-time.