Terminology

454 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 areas454 Architecture Fundamentals16 Distributed Systems73 Data Architecture71 Cloud Architecture55 Networking13 API & Integration Architecture17 Reliability & Resilience16 Observability14 Performance & Capacity Engineering13 Security Architecture50 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 concept166 practice107 pattern93 case-study26 tool26 protocol22 metric14

3 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Lock Lease Expiry	concept	Distributed Locking	The timeout on a distributed lock that prevents a crashed holder deadlocking the system — and the source of the pattern's hardest failure mode.
Optimistic Concurrency Control OCC, Compare-and-Set	pattern	Distributed Locking	Allowing concurrent work without locks and detecting conflict at write time by checking that the underlying version has not changed.
Redlock	protocol	Distributed Locking	An algorithm for distributed locking across independent Redis instances, and the subject of a well-known critique about what locks can guarantee at all.