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

9 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Booking.com's Experimentation Platform	case-study	Business Architecture	Booking.com runs over a thousand concurrent experiments and treats the ability to test any change safely as a platform capability rather than a product feature.
Business Capability	concept	Business Architecture	What a business does, expressed stably and independently of how it currently does it or who is responsible.
Product Thinking	practice	Business Architecture	Treating what you build as something with users, a value proposition and a lifecycle, rather than as a project that completes.
Regulatory Constraint	concept	Business Architecture	A legal requirement that removes design options — and one that must be established early, because it is not negotiable and is expensive to retrofit.
Spotify's Squad Model and Its Retrospective	case-study	Business Architecture	The widely-copied Spotify model of squads, tribes, chapters and guilds was a snapshot that did not work as documented even at Spotify — a caution about importing organisational design.
Stakeholder Analysis	practice	Business Architecture	Identifying who is affected by an architecture, what each of them needs from it, and how much influence they have over whether it proceeds.
Time to Market	metric	Business Architecture	How long it takes to get a capability in front of customers — often the constraint that dominates every other architectural quality.
Two-Pizza Team	concept	Business Architecture	Amazon's heuristic that a team should be small enough to be fed by two pizzas, and — the substantive part — should own its service end to end.
Value Stream	concept	Business Architecture	The end-to-end sequence of activities that delivers a result to a customer, viewed across whatever departments and systems it happens to cross.