Terminology

384 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 areas384 Architecture Fundamentals16 Distributed Systems73 Data Architecture71 Cloud Architecture17 Networking13 API & Integration Architecture17 Reliability & Resilience16 Observability14 Performance & Capacity Engineering13 Security Architecture18 Cost Architecture & FinOps12 Business Architecture9 Architecture Communication8 Enterprise Architecture8 Legacy Modernization11 AI-Era Architecture15 Software Architecture & Engineering19 Architecture Patterns15 Architecture Decision-Making11 The Architect's Meta-Skills8

Kind Any concept136 practice90 pattern81 case-study26 protocol19 tool19 metric13

15 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
AI Gateway	pattern	AI-Era Architecture	A shared proxy in front of model providers that centralises routing, keys, quotas, caching, logging and safety policy.
Context Window	concept	AI-Era Architecture	The maximum number of tokens a model can attend to in one request, holding the system prompt, history, retrieved context, tools and the answer.
Embedding	concept	AI-Era Architecture	A dense numeric vector representing a piece of content, positioned so that semantically similar content sits nearby.
Guardrail	pattern	AI-Era Architecture	A deterministic check applied to a model's input or output, enforcing rules that cannot be left to the model itself.
Human in the Loop HITL	pattern	AI-Era Architecture	Requiring human review or approval at a defined point in an automated flow, chosen by the reversibility and cost of the action.
LLM Evaluation Evals	practice	AI-Era Architecture	A repeatable measurement of whether an AI system's outputs are good enough, on cases that reflect the actual task.
Model Context Protocol MCP	protocol	AI-Era Architecture	An open protocol that standardises how AI applications connect to external tools, data sources and prompts.
Model Router	pattern	AI-Era Architecture	Directing each request to a model chosen by the task's difficulty, cost and latency budget, rather than sending everything to the largest model available.
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 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 Versioning	practice	AI-Era Architecture	Treating prompts as versioned, reviewed, tested artefacts rather than as strings edited in place.
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.
Semantic Cache	pattern	AI-Era Architecture	Caching model responses keyed by the meaning of the request rather than by its exact text, so near-duplicate questions are served without a model call.
Tool Calling Function Calling	pattern	AI-Era Architecture	Giving a model a set of typed function definitions it can request to invoke, with the application executing the call and returning the result.
Vector Database	tool	AI-Era Architecture	A store optimised for approximate nearest-neighbour search over high-dimensional embeddings.