Terminology

2240 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 areas2240 Architecture Fundamentals77 Distributed Systems107 Data Architecture110 Cloud Architecture94 Networking88 API & Integration Architecture82 Reliability & Resilience80 Observability75 Performance & Capacity Engineering72 Security Architecture86 Cost Architecture & FinOps71 Business Architecture67 Architecture Communication67 Enterprise Architecture66 Legacy Modernization71 AI-Era Architecture74 Software Architecture & Engineering71 Architecture Patterns71 Architecture Decision-Making63 The Architect's Meta-Skills61 Delivery & Release Engineering66 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience70 Testing & Quality Architecture71 Data Platform Architecture69 Streaming & Real-Time Data69 Data Governance & Semantics74 Frontend & Experience Architecture66 Edge, Mobile & IoT68 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture65 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk69

Kind Any concept806 practice738 pattern379 metric133 case-study77 tool62 protocol45

2240 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Write Skew	concept	Transactions & Isolation	An anomaly where two transactions each read a set of rows, make disjoint writes based on what they read, and together violate an invariant neither could have broken alone.
Write-Ahead Log WAL, Commit Log	concept	Data Architecture	Recording every change to a durable sequential log before applying it, so that a crash can be recovered by replaying the log.
Write-Amplification Audit Index Cost Review, Write Path Accounting	practice	Query Optimisation	Accounting for everything a single logical write actually costs - indexes, replication, triggers, deletion of old rows - before concluding that a database needs more capacity.
Write-Ownership Boundary Single-Writer Boundary, Authoritative Writer Assignment	pattern	Coexistence Patterns	The line drawn during coexistence that names exactly one system as the writer for each piece of state, placed along business transaction boundaries so that no single transaction has to commit on both sides.
Writing Decision Records ADR	practice	Writing Decision Records	Recording a decision so the next person understands why — including the options rejected and the conditions that would reverse it.
Written Communication	practice	Written Communication	Writing that reaches more people than any meeting, survives longer, and forces the thinking that verbal explanation lets you skip.
Written Design Document RFC, Design Doc	practice	Technical Proposals	A prose document proposing an approach, circulated for comment before implementation, which forces the clarity that diagrams and conversation allow you to avoid.
X-Forwarded-For Forwarded Header	concept	Reverse Proxies	The header chain recording original client addresses through a series of proxies — and a value that must never be trusted without knowing the topology.
XA Transaction	protocol	Distributed Transactions	The X/Open standard interface for two-phase commit across heterogeneous resource managers, still common in enterprise middleware and rarely the right choice for new services.
Zero Trust	concept	Security Architecture	A security model that grants no implicit trust from network position, and authenticates and authorises every request individually.
Zero-Audience Report Unopened Report, Report Audience Count	metric	BI Governance	A published dashboard with no viewer in a defined window, which is the only decommissioning candidate that can be retired without an argument - and the cheapest available measure of BI sprawl.
Zero-Downtime Cutover	practice	Zero-Downtime Migration	Moving a live system to a new implementation or datastore without an outage, using dual writes, backfill and a reversible traffic switch.
Zero-Downtime Deployment in Practice Rolling Deployment, Online Schema Change	practice	Zero-Downtime Migration	Shipping without a maintenance window, and the version-skew constraint that governs every schema and contract change.
Zero-Downtime Migration Expand and Contract, Parallel Change	pattern	Legacy Modernization	Changing a schema or system while it stays in service, by adding the new alongside the old, migrating, then removing the old.
Zero-Touch Provisioning Zero-Touch Enrolment, Automatic Enrolment	pattern	Device Provisioning	A device obtaining its identity, configuration and assignment automatically on first connection, so that installation requires no technical procedure from the person performing it.
Zombie Integration Orphaned Interface, Decommissioning Debris	concept	Application Rationalisation	An interface left running after the system at one end is retired - it consumes credentials and produces stale or lost data, prevents the savings from being booked, and makes the surrounding estate harder to change.
Zombie Task Orphaned Task, Heartbeat-Expired Task	concept	Batch Orchestration	A task whose worker has stopped reporting to the scheduler but whose process may still be running and writing, so the orchestrator retries work that has not actually stopped.
Zonal vs Regional Services	concept	Availability Zones	Whether a cloud resource lives in one availability zone or is inherently spread across several — a property that determines what a zone failure takes with it.
Zone-Aware Routing Topology-Aware Routing, Same-Zone Preference, Locality-Aware Load Balancing	pattern	Availability Zones	Sending a request to a replica in the caller's own availability zone and crossing a zone boundary only when the local replicas cannot serve - which removes a round trip and a per-gigabyte charge from every int…
Zoom's Pandemic Scale-Up	case-study	Cloud Architecture	Zoom grew from around 10 million to over 300 million daily meeting participants in roughly three months, absorbed by a hybrid architecture and a distributed media routing design.