Terminology

991 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 areas991 Architecture Fundamentals38 Distributed Systems73 Data Architecture71 Cloud Architecture55 Networking51 API & Integration Architecture45 Reliability & Resilience40 Observability33 Performance & Capacity Engineering34 Security Architecture50 Cost Architecture & FinOps30 Business Architecture28 Architecture Communication27 Enterprise Architecture27 Legacy Modernization27 AI-Era Architecture34 Software Architecture & Engineering37 Architecture Patterns34 Architecture Decision-Making30 The Architect's Meta-Skills27 Delivery & Release Engineering20 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience20 Testing & Quality Architecture20 Data Platform Architecture20 Streaming & Real-Time Data20 Data Governance & Semantics20 Frontend & Experience Architecture20 Edge, Mobile & IoT20 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture20 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk20

Kind Any concept379 practice294 pattern166 metric55 tool36 protocol35 case-study26

20 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Admission Policy	pattern	Policy as Code	A rule evaluated at the moment a resource is created or changed, which rejects the request rather than reporting on it afterwards.
Artifact Promotion	practice	Artifact Management	Moving one immutable build between repositories as it earns trust, rather than rebuilding it for each environment.
Automated Release Verification	practice	Deployment Gates	A gate that compares the new version's live signals against the old one's and decides, on stated criteria, whether to continue or revert.
Bake Time	concept	Multi-Region Rollout	The deliberate wait between rollout steps, sized by how long the fault you are watching for takes to appear.
Build Attestation	concept	Supply-Chain Provenance	A signed statement about how an artifact was produced — by which builder from which source — that a deployment gate can verify rather than trust.
Configuration Drift Detection	practice	IaC Modules & Drift	Continuously comparing declared infrastructure against what actually exists, so out-of-band change is found on a Tuesday rather than during a rebuild.
Environment Ladder	concept	Environment Strategy	The ordered set of environments a change climbs, where each rung is justified by a distinct claim it can prove that the one below cannot.
Expand-Contract Migration	pattern	Database Migration Under CD	Changing a schema in additive steps that keep old and new code both working, so deployment and migration never have to be simultaneous.
Forward Fix	practice	Rollback & Forward Fix	Resolving an incident by shipping a correction rather than reverting, which is the right choice exactly when reverting is not actually available.
Hermetic Build	practice	Build Reproducibility	A build whose output is a function only of its declared inputs, so the same commit cannot produce two different artifacts.
Integration Frequency	metric	Continuous Integration Discipline	How often each engineer merges to the mainline — the measurement that distinguishes continuous integration from having a CI server.
Merge Queue	tool	Branching Models	A serialising gate that tests each change against the current tip before merging, so a green branch cannot break the mainline.
Pipeline Fan-Out	pattern	Pipeline Architecture	Splitting independent verification work to run in parallel, bounded by what genuinely has no ordering dependency on anything else.
Pipeline Stage Contract	concept	Delivery & Release Engineering	What each pipeline stage promises the next — an artifact of a stated shape plus a specific claim about it that has been verified.
Queue Time Attribution	metric	Flow Metrics	Splitting elapsed lead time into work and waiting, and naming which queue each wait sat in.
Reconciliation Loop	pattern	GitOps	A controller that continuously compares declared state with actual state and acts to close the gap, replacing deployment as an event with convergence as a property.
Release Ring	pattern	Progressive Delivery	An ordered cohort of users a change reaches before the next one, chosen so that early rings would notice a fault and tolerate it.
Rolling Update Surge	concept	Deployment Strategies	The extra capacity a rolling deployment temporarily adds, and the unavailability it is permitted, which together decide whether the rollout is safe under load.
Standard Change	practice	Change Management vs CD	A pre-authorised class of change whose risk controls are automated and evidenced, so it does not need per-instance approval.
Workload Identity Federation	protocol	Pipeline Secrets	A pipeline proving what it is with a short-lived signed token from its own platform, so no long-lived cloud credential is ever stored.