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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
Business Impact Analysis practice Business Continuity Determining which business processes must be restored, how quickly, and what the consequence of not doing so is — the input from which recovery targets are derived.
Business KPIs metric Business KPIs The measures the business runs on — which architects should understand, influence and instrument.
Business Metric Alerting Outcome Monitoring practice Business Metrics Alerting on product outcomes rather than on technical signals, because it is the only way to catch failures where the system works correctly and produces the wrong result.
Business Metric Instrumentation practice Business Metrics Emitting metrics for business outcomes — orders, payments, signups — alongside technical telemetry, so incidents can be detected and prioritised by impact.
Business Metrics metric Business Metrics Measuring what the system exists to do — frequently the fastest and most reliable outage detector available.
Business Processes concept Business Processes The sequences of activity that exercise capabilities — where handoffs, exceptions and manual steps reveal what the architecture must support.
Business Understanding practice Business Understanding Knowing how the organisation makes money, what it is trying to achieve, and what would damage it — without which architectural judgement has no basis.
Business-Cycle Observation Window Full-Cycle Shutdown Soak, Longest-Period Consumer Watch practice Decommissioning Setting the period over which you watch for remaining consumers from the system's longest business cycle rather than from a round number of days, because a 30-day watch cannot see an annual job.
Bytes Scanned Scan Volume, Data Processed concept Analytics Cost Control The volume of data a query reads - which in consumption-priced analytical systems is both the performance limit and the bill, making layout a cost control.
Byzantine Fault concept Failure Modes A failure in which a component behaves arbitrarily or deceptively — returning wrong results rather than stopping — as distinct from simply crashing.
C4 Model practice Architecture Communication A set of four nested diagram levels — context, container, component, code — that keeps each diagram at one consistent level of abstraction.
C4 Model in Practice practice C4 Model Four nested levels of diagram — context, container, component, code — whose value is controlling altitude rather than the notation itself.
Cache Hit Ratio Economics concept Caching for Performance The non-linear relationship between cache hit rate and backend load, which determines whether a cache improvement is worth making.
Cache Invalidation concept Data Architecture The problem of removing or refreshing cached data when the underlying source changes, and the reason caching is harder than it looks.
Cache Key Completeness practice Reverse Proxies The requirement that a cache key capture every input varying the response - the property whose violation turns a caching bug into a data leak.
Cache Penetration concept Cache Invalidation Repeated lookups for keys that do not exist, which miss the cache every time by definition and pass straight through to the store.
Cache Stampede Thundering Herd, Dog-Piling concept Caching for Performance The surge of identical expensive requests to the origin when a popular cache entry expires and many concurrent callers all miss at once.
Cache-Control protocol Content Delivery Networks The HTTP header directing how a response may be cached and for how long, by browsers, proxies and CDNs.
Cache-Loss Survivability Cache Failure Blast Radius, Origin Protection practice Cache Invalidation Designing so that losing the cache degrades the system rather than destroying it - because a cache absorbing most of the read traffic is a capacity dependency, not an optimisation.
Caching Strategies pattern Caching Strategies Which cache pattern to use, how staleness is bounded, and the failure modes that only appear under load.
Caching Strategies in Practice Cache-Aside, Write-Through, Read-Through pattern Caching Strategies The write and read strategies, the stampede that takes down origins, and why cache invalidation deserves its reputation.
Caching Strategy pattern Performance & Capacity The chosen pattern for how a cache is populated, read and invalidated — cache-aside, read-through, write-through or write-behind.
Calibrated Confidence practice Judgement Under Uncertainty Expressing certainty in proportion to actual evidence, so that stated confidence carries information rather than conveying personality.
Can-I-Deploy Gate Deployment Compatibility Query, Contract Broker Gate practice Contract Testing at Scale A check at deploy time that asks whether this service version is verified against the consumer and provider versions actually running in the target environment - turning contract tests from documentation into …
Canary Release pattern Progressive Delivery Routing a small fraction of production traffic to a new version and promoting only if its metrics hold against the incumbent.
Candidate Recall Ceiling First-Stage Recall, Retrieval Ceiling metric Reranking The share of queries whose correct passage appears anywhere in the first-stage candidate set - the hard upper bound on every later stage, since reranking reorders what was retrieved and cannot add to it.
Canonical Data Model Common Data Model, Enterprise Data Model concept Integration Patterns One shared representation that every producer maps into and every consumer reads from, trading N×M translations for a single model that grows monotonically and can never be trimmed.
CAP Theorem Brewer's Theorem concept Distributed Systems During a network partition a distributed system must choose between consistency and availability; it cannot have both.
Capability Confinement Least-Privilege Agents, Trust Domain Separation, Action Authorisation concept Prompt Injection Defence Limiting what an agent is authorised to do rather than trying to prevent it from being misled - because a model cannot reliably distinguish instructions from data, so the security boundary must sit outside it.
Capability Decomposition Depth Capability Map Depth, Capability Level Choice concept Capability Maps in EA The level at which a capability map stops describing what a business does and starts describing how it is currently organised - the point past which it must be redrawn at every reorganisation and its refresh c…
Capability Flag Partner Capability, Feature Declaration practice Integration Patterns Representing genuine differences between integrated partners as explicit declared capabilities, rather than as variant fields in a shared canonical model.
Capability Heat Map practice Capability Mapping A capability map coloured by a chosen dimension — maturity, cost, risk, or strategic importance — to make patterns visible to non-technical stakeholders.
Capability Map tool Capability Maps in EA A stable, technology-neutral model of what a business does, used as the frame for assessing systems, investment and duplication.
Capability Mapping practice Capability Mapping Laying out capabilities hierarchically and overlaying information — systems, cost, health, differentiation — to make investment decisions visible.
Capability Maturity Assessment practice Business Capabilities Rating each business capability on how well it is currently performed, so investment can be directed at the gap between importance and maturity.
Capability Model concept Reference Models A structured map of what a business does, independent of how it is organised or which systems support it, used to align technology investment with function.
Capability-to-Application Mapping practice Capability Maps in EA Linking each business capability to the systems that support it, which is what converts two inventories into an analysis tool.
Capacity Borrowing Capacity Reallocation, Priority Eviction, Shared Fleet Priority practice Architectural Drivers Serving an unpredictable new load from an existing shared fleet by displacing lower-priority work, which requires that the displaceable work be identified and shaped to be interruptible before the demand arrives.
Capacity Headroom concept Capacity Planning The deliberate gap between current load and maximum capacity, sized to absorb growth, spikes and the loss of a failure domain.
Capacity Insurance Reliability Headroom, Standby Capacity concept Waste Elimination Capacity that produces no value in normal operation and exists to make failures survivable - which looks identical to waste on a utilisation dashboard and must be defended explicitly.
Capacity Lead Time Provisioning Lead Time concept Capacity Modelling The delay between deciding capacity is needed and having it available, which determines whether a capacity model can forecast at all or must instead buy optionality.
Capacity Modelling practice Capacity Modelling Predicting the resources a workload will need, from measured unit costs and a demand forecast, with deliberate headroom.
Capacity Planning practice Reliability & Resilience Deciding in advance how much capacity will be needed, given growth, seasonality and failure scenarios, and ensuring it can be there in time.
Capacity Reservation On-Demand Capacity Reservation, Zonal Capacity Hold pattern Reserved & Committed Capacity Paying to hold specific hardware in a specific zone whether or not it is running, which is the only purchase that guarantees a launch succeeds and is separate from every discount instrument.
Capital One 2019: From SSRF to the Metadata Endpoint IMDSv1 Breach case-study Identity & Access Management A server-side request forgery reached the cloud instance metadata service, obtained temporary credentials, and used an over-permissioned role to read a very large volume of data.
Capital One's Data Centre Exit case-study Enterprise Architecture A major US bank closed all eight of its data centres and moved fully to public cloud, treating governance automation as the enabling technology rather than a constraint.
Captive User Signal Mandated Tool Measurement, Workaround Count metric Product Thinking The small set of measurements that still carry information when users cannot choose an alternative - workarounds, time to first success, abandonment - because usage and satisfaction no longer do.
Cardinality concept Observability The number of distinct time series produced by a metric, which is the product of the distinct values of all its labels — and the main driver of monitoring cost.
Cardinality Budget Series Budget, Label Quota practice Cardinality A measured, owned limit on the number of distinct metric series a team may create - the control that converts an invisible cost externality into a visible constraint.
Cardinality Estimation concept Query Optimisation The planner's prediction of how many rows each step of a query will produce — the input that determines every other choice it makes.
Career Development practice Career Development How architectural careers actually progress — through scope, judgement and demonstrated outcomes rather than through accumulated technology knowledge.
Cascading Timeout concept Timeouts & Deadlines The effect of independently-chosen per-hop timeouts summing to a total far longer than any caller is willing to wait.
Cash-Releasing Benefit Hard Saving, Budget-Line Saving concept Business Cases A benefit that reduces a named budget line on a known date, as distinct from released capacity or avoided cost - which are real but do not become money until a further decision is taken.
Catch-Up Throttling Recovery Rate Limiting, Drain Control practice Streaming & Real-Time Data Deliberately limiting how fast a recovered consumer drains its backlog, so that recovery does not become a second and larger incident.
Causal Consistency concept Consistency Models A model guaranteeing that operations which causally depend on one another are seen in the same order everywhere, while concurrent operations may be seen in any order.
CDC Initial Snapshot concept Change Data Capture The consistent full copy taken when a CDC pipeline starts, before streaming begins — and the step that determines whether the target is correct.
CDC Pipeline Design practice CDC Pipeline Design The concerns that turn log-based change capture from a demo into something that can be relied on — snapshots, ordering, schema change and replay.
Cell Cellular Architecture, Bulkhead Cell, Independent Stack pattern Cell-Based Architecture A complete, independent instance of a system serving a subset of customers, sharing no state with other cells - so that almost every class of failure is bounded to one cell's population rather than the whole u…
Cell Isolation pattern Bulkheads & Isolation Bulkheading at the level of a complete system copy, so that any failure — including ones nobody predicted — is contained to the customers assigned to one cell.
Cell Router Cell Mapping Layer, Partition Front Door pattern Cell-Based Architecture The thin shared component that maps a customer to their cell - the one part of a cell-based architecture that is not isolated, and therefore the part that must be simplest.