Terminology

2185 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 areas2185 Architecture Fundamentals77 Distributed Systems107 Data Architecture110 Cloud Architecture89 Networking88 API & Integration Architecture82 Reliability & Resilience75 Observability70 Performance & Capacity Engineering72 Security Architecture81 Cost Architecture & FinOps66 Business Architecture67 Architecture Communication67 Enterprise Architecture66 Legacy Modernization66 AI-Era Architecture69 Software Architecture & Engineering71 Architecture Patterns71 Architecture Decision-Making63 The Architect's Meta-Skills61 Delivery & Release Engineering66 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience70 Testing & Quality Architecture66 Data Platform Architecture64 Streaming & Real-Time Data69 Data Governance & Semantics69 Frontend & Experience Architecture66 Edge, Mobile & IoT68 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture65 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk64

Kind Any concept785 practice729 pattern362 metric125 case-study77 tool62 protocol45

89 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Account Vending	practice	Landing Zones	Automated creation of new cloud accounts pre-configured with the organisation's networking, identity, logging, guardrails and cost allocation.
Active-Active vs Active-Passive	concept	Multi-Region Architecture	Whether all regions serve traffic simultaneously, or one serves while another waits to take over — a choice about which failure mode you would rather have.
Application Discovery	practice	Cloud Migration	Establishing what applications exist, what they depend on, who owns them and whether anyone uses them — the step whose absence makes every later step a guess.
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.
Availability Zone Independence	concept	Availability Zones	The property that a failure in one zone does not propagate to another, and the design work needed to actually benefit from it.
Backup Restore Testing	practice	Backup Strategies	Periodically performing a full restore and measuring it, on the basis that an untested backup is a hypothesis rather than a capability.
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.
Block Storage Persistent Disk, EBS	concept	Cloud Storage	A virtual disk attached to one instance at a time, presented as raw blocks and formatted with a filesystem — the storage databases and stateful workloads run on.
Burst Capacity Cloud Bursting, Overflow Capacity	concept	Cloud Architecture	Capacity acquired quickly for short-lived demand above the baseline, deliberately priced higher than owned capacity in exchange for immediate availability.
Burstable Instance T-series, B-series	concept	Compute Models	An instance that provides a low baseline CPU allocation and accrues credits while idle, spendable for short periods of full performance.
Cloud Databases	concept	Cloud Databases	Managed and cloud-native database services — where the operational relief is real, and where the abstraction leaks.
Cloud Disaster Recovery	practice	Disaster Recovery	Designing and rehearsing recovery from the loss of a zone, a region or a provider — where the plan is worth exactly as much as its last test.
Cloud Exit Plan	practice	Multi-Cloud	A documented, costed assessment of what leaving a provider or service would require — increasingly a regulatory expectation and a better lock-in control than portability itself.
Cloud Governance	practice	Cloud Governance	The account structure, identity model, guardrails and cost attribution that make a cloud estate operable by many teams without becoming ungovernable.
Cloud Migration	practice	Cloud Migration	Moving workloads to the cloud — where the strategy per workload matters more than the programme, and where lift-and-shift produces the bill that discredits the whole effort.
Cloud Storage	concept	Cloud Storage	Object, block and file storage — with different durability, latency and cost models, and an egress bill that shapes architecture more than most designs admit.
Cold-Start Amortisation Warm Affinity, Startup Cost Reduction	practice	Serverless	Attacking the startup cost itself - through snapshots, lazy image pulls, local artefact caches and affinity routing - rather than choosing between scaling strategies that all suffer from it.
Compute Models	concept	Compute Models	Virtual machines, containers, serverless functions and dedicated hardware — chosen by workload shape rather than by modernity.
Connection Draining Deregistration Delay, Graceful Shutdown	practice	Load Balancing	Allowing in-flight requests on an instance to complete before it is removed from service, rather than terminating them at cutover.
Connection Proxy RDS Proxy, PgBouncer	tool	Cloud Databases	A pooling layer between applications and a managed database that multiplexes many client connections onto a small number of database connections.
Container Image	concept	Containers	A layered, content-addressed filesystem bundle plus metadata, from which containers are instantiated — immutable by construction and identified by digest.
Containers	tool	Containers	Packaging an application with its dependencies into an immutable image, and the orchestration layer that schedules those images across a fleet.
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.
Control Plane vs Data Plane	concept	Cloud Architecture	The separation between the system that manages configuration and the system that serves requests, which have very different reliability requirements.
Cross-Zone Data Transfer	concept	Availability Zones	Charges incurred when data moves between availability zones within a region — invisible on architecture diagrams and a recurring surprise on cloud bills.
Cross-Zone Load Balancing	concept	Load Balancing	Whether a load balancer node distributes traffic to targets in all zones or only its own — a setting that affects both balance and data transfer cost.
Drift Reconciliation Post-Incident Codification, Managed Divergence	practice	Infrastructure as Code	Treating divergence between declared and actual infrastructure as an expected condition with an owned resolution path, rather than as a violation to be automatically reverted.
Durability vs Availability	concept	Cloud Storage	Two different storage guarantees — whether data survives, and whether it can be reached right now — routinely conflated because both are quoted in nines.
Edge Computing	concept	Edge Computing	Running computation at points of presence near users rather than in a central region, trading capability for round-trip latency.
Edge Function	concept	Edge Computing	Code executed at a CDN point of presence close to the user, in a constrained, fast-starting runtime, typically to modify or route a request before it reaches an origin.
Egress-First Cost Modelling Bandwidth-Dominant Costing, Cost Order of Magnitude	practice	Cloud Architecture	Establishing which cost category actually dominates before optimising anything - because in media-heavy consumer platforms the order is usually bandwidth, then storage, then compute, which is the inverse of wh…
Entity Homing Home Region, Per-Entity Primary	pattern	Multi-Region Architecture	Assigning each entity - customer, account, tenant - a single home region that owns its writes, so a regional outage affects a subset of entities rather than every write in the system.
Failback	practice	Disaster Recovery	Returning to the primary region after a failover, including reconciling the data written while it was unavailable — the half of DR that is usually unplanned.
Fragmentation Cost Bin-Packing Loss, Scheduling Fragmentation	concept	Compute Models	The capacity that exists in aggregate but cannot be used because it is scattered across nodes in pieces too small for the jobs that need it - the dominant inefficiency in indivisible-resource scheduling.
Gang Scheduling Co-scheduling, All-or-Nothing Allocation	concept	Compute Models	Allocating every resource a job needs simultaneously or not at all, so tightly-coupled distributed work cannot deadlock holding a partial allocation.
Global Traffic Management GSLB, Global Load Balancing	tool	Multi-Region Architecture	The layer that decides which region a given user reaches, using DNS, anycast or an edge network, and that performs regional failover.
Google Borg to Kubernetes: Learning From an Internal System Borg, Omega	case-study	Containers	Kubernetes was designed with a decade of Borg experience behind it, and its authors have been explicit about which Borg decisions they deliberately did not repeat.
Image Registry	tool	Containers	The store from which container images are pulled, and an under-appreciated availability and security dependency of every deployment and every autoscale event.
Immutable Backup Object Lock, WORM	pattern	Backup Strategies	A backup that cannot be modified or deleted for a defined retention period, even by an administrator — the control that makes backups survive ransomware and insider error.
Infrastructure as Code IaC	practice	Cloud Architecture	Defining infrastructure in version-controlled declarative files that a tool reconciles against the real environment.
Infrastructure as Code in Practice IaC	practice	Infrastructure as Code	Defining infrastructure declaratively in version-controlled code so environments are reproducible, reviewable and auditable.
Instance Family	concept	Compute Models	A group of instance types sharing a resource profile — general purpose, compute optimised, memory optimised, storage optimised, accelerated — chosen by which resource the workload actually exhausts first.
Kubernetes K8s	tool	Cloud Architecture	A container orchestrator that continuously reconciles the running state of a cluster towards a declared desired state.
Kubernetes Operator	pattern	Kubernetes	A custom controller that encodes operational knowledge for a specific application, reconciling a custom resource towards a desired state the same way built-in controllers do.
Kubernetes Resource Requests and Limits	concept	Kubernetes	The declared minimum a container is guaranteed and the maximum it may consume, which drive scheduling, eviction and throttling in ways that are easy to get wrong.
Landing Zone	pattern	Landing Zones	The pre-built, policy-governed cloud foundation into which workloads are deployed — account structure, networking, identity, logging and guardrails.
Maersk and NotPetya: Recovery from a Single Surviving Copy NotPetya 2017	case-study	Backup Strategies	A destructive malware outbreak encrypted Maersk's estate globally, and the domain controllers were recovered only because one office had been offline during the attack.
Managed Service	concept	Cloud Architecture	A capability the provider operates — provisioning, patching, backup, scaling and failover — leaving you the configuration and the data.
Managed Service Upgrade Window	concept	Managed Services	The period during which a provider may apply patches or version upgrades to a managed service, usually involving a failover or brief unavailability.
Managed Services	concept	Managed Services	Paying a provider to operate a component — usually the right default, with a small number of genuine reasons to self-manage.
Migration Wave	practice	Cloud Migration	A batch of applications migrated together, sequenced so that dependencies move in a workable order and each wave delivers learning for the next.
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.
Multi-Region Active-Active	pattern	Multi-Region Architecture	Serving live traffic from two or more regions simultaneously, which removes failover time and introduces distributed data problems permanently.
Netflix: Regional Evacuation Chaos Kong, Region Failover	case-study	Multi-Region Architecture	Netflix rehearses shifting all traffic out of an entire AWS region, which is what makes the capability real rather than documented.
Object Storage	concept	Cloud Architecture	Flat, HTTP-addressable storage for immutable blobs with rich metadata — effectively unlimited, cheap, and not a filesystem.
Pilot Light	pattern	Disaster Recovery	A disaster recovery posture where core data is continuously replicated and minimal infrastructure runs, with the rest provisioned only on failover.
Pod	concept	Kubernetes	The smallest deployable unit in Kubernetes — one or more containers that share a network namespace, storage volumes and a lifecycle, scheduled together on one node.