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

17 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Autoscaling	pattern	Cloud Architecture	Adding and removing capacity automatically in response to a demand signal, to track load without paying for peak all the time.
Availability Zone AZ	concept	Cloud Architecture	One or more physically separate data centres inside a cloud region, with independent power, cooling and network, connected by low-latency links.
Backup Strategy 3-2-1 Rule	practice	Cloud Architecture	A plan for what is copied, how often, where to, how long it is kept, and — the part that decides whether it is real — how the restore is verified.
Blast Radius	concept	Cloud Architecture	The set of things that break, or become reachable, when one component fails or is compromised.
Blast Radius Reduction	practice	Cloud Architecture	The set of deliberate partitions — accounts, regions, zones, cells, tenants, deployment stages — that bound how far any single failure or compromise can reach.
Control Plane and Data Plane	concept	Cloud Architecture	The separation between the machinery that makes changes to a system and the machinery that serves its traffic.
Infrastructure as Code IaC	practice	Cloud Architecture	Defining infrastructure in version-controlled declarative files that a tool reconciles against the real environment.
Kubernetes K8s	tool	Cloud Architecture	A container orchestrator that continuously reconciles the running state of a cluster towards a declared desired state.
Landing Zone	practice	Cloud Architecture	A pre-configured, governed cloud environment — accounts, networking, identity, logging, guardrails — into which workloads can be deployed safely.
Managed Service	concept	Cloud Architecture	A capability the provider operates — provisioning, patching, backup, scaling and failover — leaving you the configuration and the data.
Multi-Cloud	concept	Cloud Architecture	Deliberately running across more than one cloud provider — a decision with a much higher cost than the lock-in it is usually adopted to avoid.
Object Storage	concept	Cloud Architecture	Flat, HTTP-addressable storage for immutable blobs with rich metadata — effectively unlimited, cheap, and not a filesystem.
Serverless	concept	Cloud Architecture	A model where the provider allocates and scales compute per request, and you are billed for execution rather than for provisioned capacity.
Serverless Cold Start	concept	Serverless	The additional latency when a function invocation must allocate and initialise a new execution environment rather than reusing a warm one.
Slack's Cellular Migration	case-study	Cloud Architecture	After repeated availability-zone-level incidents, Slack rebuilt its infrastructure into per-zone cells with the ability to drain traffic away from a failing zone in minutes.
Well-Architected Review	practice	Cloud Architecture	A structured self-assessment of a workload against defined pillars — operational excellence, security, reliability, performance, cost, and sustainability.
Zoom's Pandemic Scale-Up	case-study	Cloud Architecture	Zoom grew from around 10 million to over 300 million daily meeting participants in roughly three months, absorbed by a hybrid architecture and a distributed media routing design.