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

15 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Backend for Frontend BFF	pattern	Architecture Patterns	A separate, narrow backend per client experience, which aggregates and reshapes downstream services for exactly that client's needs.
Cell-Based Architecture Cellular Architecture	pattern	Architecture Patterns	Partitioning a service into complete, independent copies of itself, each serving a subset of customers, so a failure is bounded to one cell.
Competing Consumers	pattern	Architecture Patterns	Multiple identical consumers reading from one queue, so throughput scales with consumer count and work is distributed automatically.
Event-Driven Architecture EDA	pattern	Architecture Patterns	A style in which components communicate by emitting and reacting to facts about what happened, rather than by calling each other.
Hexagonal Architecture Ports and Adapters	pattern	Architecture Patterns	Putting the domain at the centre and letting everything external — UI, database, queues — attach through ports implemented by replaceable adapters.
Layered Architecture N-Tier	pattern	Architecture Patterns	Organising code into horizontal layers — presentation, application, domain, data — where each layer may only call the one beneath it.
Modular Monolith	pattern	Architecture Patterns	A single deployable unit internally partitioned into modules with enforced boundaries, explicit interfaces and no shared internal state.
Outbox Pattern Transactional Outbox	pattern	Architecture Patterns	Writing an outgoing message into a table in the same transaction as the business change, and relaying it to the broker separately, so the two cannot diverge.
Pipes and Filters	pattern	Architecture Patterns	Decomposing processing into independent steps connected by channels, each transforming its input and passing it on.
Prime Video's Move Back to a Monolith Prime Video VQA Rearchitecture	case-study	Architecture Patterns	Amazon Prime Video consolidated a serverless, distributed audio/video monitoring service into a single process and reported a 90% cost reduction — the most-cited example of microservices being the wrong tool.
Publish/Subscribe Pub/Sub	pattern	Architecture Patterns	A messaging pattern where each published message is delivered to every interested subscriber, rather than to one competing worker.
Service Mesh	tool	Architecture Patterns	An infrastructure layer of sidecar proxies that handles service-to-service networking — mTLS, retries, timeouts, routing, telemetry — outside the application.
Shopify's Pods and Modular Monolith	case-study	Architecture Patterns	Shopify handles Black Friday scale with isolated pods — complete stacks each serving a subset of merchants — while keeping the application itself a deliberately modular monolith.
Sidecar	pattern	Architecture Patterns	Deploying a helper process alongside the main application in the same unit, to supply cross-cutting behaviour without changing the application.
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.