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Terminology

2240 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 areas2240 Architecture Fundamentals77 Distributed Systems107 Data Architecture110 Cloud Architecture94 Networking88 API & Integration Architecture82 Reliability & Resilience80 Observability75 Performance & Capacity Engineering72 Security Architecture86 Cost Architecture & FinOps71 Business Architecture67 Architecture Communication67 Enterprise Architecture66 Legacy Modernization71 AI-Era Architecture74 Software Architecture & Engineering71 Architecture Patterns71 Architecture Decision-Making63 The Architect's Meta-Skills61 Delivery & Release Engineering66 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience70 Testing & Quality Architecture71 Data Platform Architecture69 Streaming & Real-Time Data69 Data Governance & Semantics74 Frontend & Experience Architecture66 Edge, Mobile & IoT68 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture65 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk69
Kind Any concept806 practice738 pattern379 metric133 case-study77 tool62 protocol45

66 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.
Approval Wait Queue Time in Lead Time, Waiting Not Working metric Flow Metrics The portion of lead time spent waiting for a human rather than for a machine - frequently the largest single component and invisible inside the aggregate because nobody measures it separately.
Artefact Promotion Build Once Deploy Many practice Artifact Management Moving the identical tested artefact between environments rather than rebuilding for each - so that what runs in production is what was tested.
Artifact Promotion practice Artifact Management Moving one immutable build between repositories as it earns trust, rather than rebuilding it for each environment.
Artifact Repository Binary Repository, Package Registry tool Artifact Management The system of record for built binaries, container images and packages, holding immutable versioned artifacts with their metadata.
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.
Blue-Green Deployment pattern Deployment Strategies Two complete production environments where traffic is switched from the old to the new in one step, and back just as fast.
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.
Build Reproducibility Reproducible Build, Deterministic Build practice Build Reproducibility The same source input produces a bit-for-bit identical artifact, on any machine, at any time.
Canary Release pattern Progressive Delivery Routing a small fraction of production traffic to a new version and promoting only if its metrics hold against the incumbent.
Change-Aware Test Selection Affected Test Selection, Predictive Test Selection practice Pipeline Architecture Running only the tests a change could affect, determined from a dependency graph - with periodic full runs to verify the selection itself.
Comparative Canary Control-Group Canary, A/B Rollout Analysis, Baseline Comparison pattern Progressive Delivery Evaluating a canary against a simultaneously-running control group of the same size rather than against fixed thresholds, so environmental variation cancels out and genuine regressions are detectable at much s…
Configuration as Change Config-Code Parity, Data Deployment Rigour, Non-Code Change Control concept Change Management vs CD Applying the review, validation, staging and rollback discipline of code deployment to configuration, content and data updates - because they change production behaviour, ship more often, and are interpreted w…
Configuration Drift concept IaC Modules & Drift The gap that opens between the infrastructure your code describes and the infrastructure that actually exists.
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.
Content Artefact Release Data-as-Release, Non-Code Release Engineering practice Artifact Management Applying full release engineering - versioning, staged rollout, health gates and a rollback path - to artefacts that are not code but are interpreted by privileged code, such as detection content, rule sets, m…
Continuous Integration Discipline practice Continuous Integration Discipline The behavioural commitments that make CI a defect-detection system rather than a build server that runs tests.
Delivery Pipelines practice Delivery & Release Engineering The automated path from commit to production — where speed and trustworthiness determine whether anyone uses the feedback it produces.
Dependency Reproducibility Same Commit Same Dependencies, Pinned Builds practice Build Reproducibility Guaranteeing that a given commit pulls the same dependencies every time - the practical subset of build reproducibility that delivers most of its value for a fraction of the effort.
Deployment Freeze Change Freeze, Code Freeze practice Change Management vs CD A period during which deployments are prohibited, intended to protect a high-stakes business window.
Deployment Gate Quality Gate, Approval Gate practice Deployment Gates A condition a change must satisfy before it advances, whether evaluated by a machine or signed by a person.
Deployment Pipeline CD Pipeline, Build Pipeline pattern Pipeline Architecture The automated path a commit travels from source to production, where every stage is a chance to reject the change and no stage can be skipped.
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.
Environment Strategy practice Environment Strategy The deliberate choice of how many pre-production environments exist, what each is for, and how faithfully each mirrors production.
Etsy: Deploying Fifty Times a Day Code as Craft case-study Continuous Integration Discipline Etsy demonstrated that very frequent small deployments reduce risk rather than increasing it, and paired it with blameless postmortems.
Expand and Contract Parallel Change, Expand-Migrate-Contract pattern Database Migration Under CD Changing a schema or contract in three deployable steps so old and new code are correct at every moment.
Feature Flag Feature Toggle pattern Progressive Delivery A runtime switch that separates deploying code from releasing behaviour.
Fork-Triggered Build Privileged Trigger, Pwn Request concept Pipeline Secrets A continuous-integration trigger that runs a workflow in the base repository's privileged context while its inputs come from an outside contributor - so the pipeline executes attacker-authored code with its ow…
Forward Fix Roll Forward, Fix Forward practice Rollback & Forward Fix Recovering from a bad release by shipping a corrective change rather than reverting to the previous version.
GitOps practice GitOps Declaring desired infrastructure state in version control and letting an in-cluster agent continuously reconcile reality to it.
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.
Infrastructure State Partition State Splitting, Per-Domain State practice IaC Modules & Drift Splitting one infrastructure state file into several along ownership and lifecycle boundaries, so plans are fast and a mistaken apply cannot reach unrelated resources.
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.
Integration Throughput Ceiling Merge Queue Capacity, Serial Merge Limit metric Continuous Integration Discipline The maximum merges per day a verification pipeline can admit, set by run duration and merge concurrency, which caps how many engineers can integrate continuously before behaviour changes.
Lead Time for Changes metric Flow Metrics The elapsed time from code committed to code running in production.
Leading Health Signal In-Band Invariant Signal, Detection-Latency Gate concept Deployment Strategies A rollout gate input whose latency is shorter than the damage it indicates - the property that decides whether any bake time can catch a defect, as distinct from how much traffic the rollout exposes.
Merge Queue Merge Train, Serialised Integration practice Continuous Integration Discipline Testing each change against the combination that will actually exist after merge, rather than against the base it was written on - preventing the broken trunk that concurrent merges produce.
Mutable Image Tag Repushed Tag, Tag Drift concept Artifact Management A registry tag that can be repointed to different content, so the same reference resolves to different artefacts over time or in different places - which makes deployments unreproducible and audit answers wrong.
Netflix Spinnaker: Automated Canary Analysis Spinnaker, Kayenta case-study Progressive Delivery Netflix made canary analysis a statistical comparison run by a machine rather than an engineer watching a dashboard.
Pipeline Change Coverage Change Denominator, Measured Change Share metric Flow Metrics The share of changes reaching production that the delivery pipeline actually measures - the denominator that decides whether elite delivery metrics describe the system or only the part of it that happens to be…
Pipeline Credential Scope OIDC Federation for CI, Workload Identity for CI practice Pipeline Secrets Granting a pipeline short-lived, narrowly scoped identity for exactly the environment it is deploying to, rather than a long-lived key.
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.
Policy as Code Guardrail Policy practice Policy as Code Expressing organisational rules as executable code evaluated automatically in pipelines and at admission, instead of as prose enforced by review.
Policy Failure Mode Admission Fail-Open, Fail-Closed Policy concept Policy as Code What an admission-time policy engine does when it cannot be reached - fail open and allow the change, or fail closed and block it - decided per policy class rather than globally, because a uniform answer is wr…
Progressive Rollout Wave Deployment, Staged Rollout practice Multi-Region Rollout Deploying across regions or cells in ordered waves with soak time between them, so a defect is contained to the earliest wave.
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.
Recovery Load Restoration Surge, Post-Incident Backlog, Catch-Up Traffic concept Rollback & Forward Fix The traffic generated by a system returning to service - reconnections, queued work, cold caches, retries - which is qualitatively different from steady-state load and routinely turns a short incident into a l…
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.
Release Tarball Divergence Archive-Repository Gap, Distributed-Source Divergence concept Supply-Chain Provenance The gap between a project's reviewed source repository and the source archive that downstream actually builds, which is a trust boundary most supply-chain controls assume does not exist.
Release Train pattern Deployment Strategies A fixed-cadence release where whatever is ready by the departure time ships, and whatever is not waits for the next one.
Release Unit Promotable Set, Deployment Bundle concept Delivery & Release Engineering The complete set of inputs a promotion must move together - artefact digest, configuration revision, flag defaults and schema version - because promoting only the artefact leaves the rest as untested variables.
Restore-Only Rollback No-Downgrade Path, Backup-Dependent Reversal concept Rollback & Forward Fix The state of a system that cannot be returned to its previous version by deploying it, so the only reversal available is restoring from backup - which converts a minutes-long rollback into a recovery operation…
Reverse Compatibility Window Revert Window, Rollback Precondition concept Rollback & Forward Fix The period during which every live consumer must still accept the previous version's output, because a rollback of one component is a forward-incompatible change for everything downstream of 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.
Significant-Minority Trigger Defined Escalation Criteria, When Humans Review practice Deployment Gates A stated rule defining which changes require human review, so the reservation of manual approval is a rule rather than a judgement made under time pressure.
Soak Period Bake Time, Observation Window practice Multi-Region Rollout The deliberate waiting time between rollout stages, long enough to surface problems that do not appear immediately - and the first thing compressed under delivery pressure.
Software Bill of Materials SBOM tool Supply-Chain Provenance A machine-readable inventory of every component and dependency inside a built artifact.