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

12 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Architecture Cost Model	practice	Cost & FinOps	A calculation, made during design, of what an architecture will cost to run at expected and at peak volume.
Chargeback and Showback	practice	Cost & FinOps	Attributing cloud cost to the teams that generate it — either informationally (showback) or by moving it onto their budget (chargeback).
Cloud Pricing Models	concept	Cost & FinOps	The purchase options for cloud compute — on-demand, committed use, and spot — which differ by up to 90% for identical hardware.
Cost per Request	metric	Cost & FinOps	The fully-loaded infrastructure cost of serving one request, and the unit that makes architectural cost decisions comparable.
Cost vs Reliability Trade-off	concept	Cost & FinOps	The non-linear relationship between availability and spend, which makes each additional nine roughly an order of magnitude more expensive.
Dropbox's Move Off S3 Magic Pocket	case-study	Cost & FinOps	Dropbox moved the majority of its file storage off Amazon S3 onto custom infrastructure, reporting savings that its S-1 filing put at roughly $75 million over two years.
Egress Cost Data Transfer Out	concept	Cost & FinOps	The charge for moving data out of a cloud provider or across its zones and regions — usually the least-anticipated line on a cloud bill.
Egress Path Analysis	practice	Network & Egress Costs	Tracing where data physically moves in an architecture, because transfer charges follow paths that appear nowhere on the diagram.
FinOps	practice	Cost & FinOps	The practice of giving engineering teams visibility into and accountability for the cost of what they build and run.
Rightsizing	practice	Cost & FinOps	Matching provisioned resources to observed demand, rather than to the guess made when they were created.
Storage Tiering	practice	Cost & FinOps	Moving data between access tiers as it cools, so rarely-read data is not paying hot-storage prices.
Total Cost of Ownership TCO	metric	Cost & FinOps	The full lifetime cost of a capability, including the people, operations, upgrades and exit that a licence comparison leaves out.