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Terminology

342 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 areas342 Architecture Fundamentals16 Distributed Systems73 Data Architecture29 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 concept119 practice84 pattern70 case-study26 protocol18 tool14 metric11

17 terms shown.

Term Kind Topic What it is
API Gateway pattern API & Integration A single entry point in front of a set of services that handles authentication, rate limiting, routing and protocol translation.
Backward Compatibility concept API & Integration The property that a new version of a producer continues to work with clients written against the old version.
Contract Testing practice API & Integration Verifying that a provider satisfies the expectations each of its consumers actually relies on, without running all the services together.
Dead Letter Queue DLQ pattern API & Integration A separate queue that receives messages which could not be processed after a set number of attempts, so they neither block the consumer nor disappear.
Enterprise Integration Patterns EIP practice API & Integration A catalogue of named, composable messaging patterns — router, translator, aggregator, splitter, filter, dead letter channel — that gives integration work a shared vocabulary.
Event-Driven Integration pattern API & Integration Systems integrating by publishing and consuming events rather than by calling each other's APIs.
GraphQL protocol API & Integration A query language and runtime where the client specifies exactly which fields it needs, against a typed schema, usually via a single endpoint.
gRPC protocol API & Integration A contract-first RPC framework using Protocol Buffers over HTTP/2, with generated clients and servers and first-class streaming.
Idempotency Key pattern API & Integration A client-generated unique value sent with a request so the server can recognise a retry and return the original result instead of acting twice.
LinkedIn and the Origin of Kafka case-study API & Integration Kafka was built to replace point-to-point data integration between many systems with a single durable log that any system could publish to and any number could read.
OpenAPI Swagger tool API & Integration A machine-readable specification format for HTTP APIs, from which documentation, clients, servers, mocks and validation can be generated.
Rate Limiting pattern API & Integration Bounding how many requests a caller may make in a window, to protect capacity and enforce fair use.
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.
Semantic Diffing of API Schemas practice Backward Compatibility Comparing the published contract between builds and failing the build on a breaking change, so compatibility is mechanical rather than remembered.
Semantic Versioning SemVer practice API Versioning A version scheme where the number itself states the compatibility promise — major for breaking, minor for additive, patch for fixes.
Stripe's API Versioning case-study API & Integration Stripe pins each account to the API version current when it integrated and transforms requests and responses between versions internally, so integrations never break and the core stays modern.
Webhook pattern API & Integration An HTTP callback from a provider to a consumer-supplied URL when an event occurs, replacing polling with push.