Terminology

301 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 areas301 Architecture Fundamentals16 Distributed Systems32 Data Architecture29 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 concept96 practice84 pattern57 case-study26 protocol14 tool13 metric11

11 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Architecture Decision Record ADR	practice	Architecture Decision-Making	A short, immutable document capturing one architectural decision, its context, the alternatives, and its consequences.
Architecture Trade-off Analysis Method ATAM	practice	Architecture Decision-Making	A structured evaluation that scores an architecture against prioritised quality-attribute scenarios and identifies the points where those attributes conflict.
Build vs Buy	concept	Architecture Decision-Making	The choice between developing a capability in-house and acquiring it, decided on differentiation and total cost rather than on feature lists.
Delivery vs Maintainability Short-term Delivery vs Long-term Maintainability, Speed vs Quality	concept	Architecture Decision-Making	Choosing where to take deliberate shortcuts, based on which kinds of debt are cheap to repay and which compound.
Managed vs Self-Managed	concept	Architecture Decision-Making	Trading control, portability and unit cost against the operational burden of running the thing yourself.
Monolith vs Microservices	concept	Architecture Decision-Making	A trade of deployment independence against distributed-systems complexity, decided by team topology far more often than by technology.
Reversible Decision Two-Way Door	concept	Architecture Decision-Making	A choice that can be undone cheaply, and which therefore deserves far less deliberation than an irreversible one.
Security vs Usability	concept	Architecture Decision-Making	A trade-off that is usually resolved by varying the control with the value of the action, rather than by choosing a uniform level of friction.
SQL vs NoSQL	concept	Architecture Decision-Making	A choice driven by access patterns, consistency requirements and query flexibility — not by data volume, which is the reason usually given.
Strong vs Eventual Consistency	concept	Architecture Decision-Making	A per-operation decision, not a per-system one: whether this specific read must reflect every completed write.
Synchronous vs Asynchronous Communication	concept	Architecture Decision-Making	Whether the caller waits for the callee's answer — decided by whether the caller's outcome depends on it, not by latency or taste.