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

7 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Amazon Dynamo: Always Writeable Dynamo Paper	case-study	Consistency Models	Amazon chose an always-writeable shopping cart with application-level conflict resolution, accepting merge complexity to guarantee that "add to cart" never fails.
Causal Consistency	concept	Consistency Models	A model guaranteeing that operations which causally depend on one another are seen in the same order everywhere, while concurrent operations may be seen in any order.
Consistent Prefix Read	concept	Consistency Models	A guarantee that if a sequence of writes happens in a given order, a reader sees a prefix of that sequence — never an out-of-order subset.
Invariant-Aligned Partitioning Partition by Invariant, Single-Writer Per Entity	concept	Consistency Models	Choosing the partition key so that every strong-consistency invariant falls entirely inside one partition - which converts distributed coordination into local serialisation.
Linearizability Atomic Consistency, Strong Consistency	concept	Consistency Models	The strongest single-object guarantee — every operation appears to take effect instantaneously at some point between its call and its return.
Optimistic Claim Conditional Assignment, Compare-and-Set Dispatch	pattern	Consistency Models	Ranking candidates from deliberately stale data and resolving the race atomically at the moment of commitment, rather than locking during selection.
Read-Your-Writes Consistency Read-After-Write	concept	Consistency Models	A guarantee that a client always sees its own prior writes, even in a system that is otherwise eventually consistent.