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Terminology

2185 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 areas2185 Architecture Fundamentals77 Distributed Systems107 Data Architecture110 Cloud Architecture89 Networking88 API & Integration Architecture82 Reliability & Resilience75 Observability70 Performance & Capacity Engineering72 Security Architecture81 Cost Architecture & FinOps66 Business Architecture67 Architecture Communication67 Enterprise Architecture66 Legacy Modernization66 AI-Era Architecture69 Software Architecture & Engineering71 Architecture Patterns71 Architecture Decision-Making63 The Architect's Meta-Skills61 Delivery & Release Engineering66 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience70 Testing & Quality Architecture66 Data Platform Architecture64 Streaming & Real-Time Data69 Data Governance & Semantics69 Frontend & Experience Architecture66 Edge, Mobile & IoT68 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture65 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk64
Kind Any concept785 practice729 pattern362 metric125 case-study77 tool62 protocol45

66 terms shown.

Term Kind Topic What it is
Adoption Barrier Diagnosis Why Teams Built Their Own, Duplication Root Cause practice Application Rationalisation Treating duplicated internal systems as evidence that the shared option was harder to adopt than to rebuild - and fixing that before consolidating, or the duplication returns.
Advisory Review Model practice Architecture Review Boards Running architecture review as a consulting service that improves designs rather than as an approval gate that permits them.
Application Architecture concept Application Architecture The set of applications, what each is responsible for, and how they relate — the view that reveals duplication and orphaned ownership.
Application Landscape concept Application Architecture The inventory of systems in an organisation with their ownership, capabilities supported, integrations and lifecycle status.
Application Portfolio Management practice Application Portfolio Management Managing the set of applications as an investment portfolio — deciding what to invest in, maintain, contain and retire.
Application Portfolio Management APM, Application Rationalisation practice Enterprise Architecture Maintaining an inventory of every application with its owner, cost, business value and technical health, and using it to decide what to invest in, replace or retire.
Application Portfolio Rationalisation APM, Portfolio Rationalisation practice Application Rationalisation Systematically assessing every application in the estate to decide what to keep, invest in, consolidate or retire.
Application Rationalisation practice Application Rationalisation Systematically reducing the number of applications in an estate by consolidating duplicates and retiring low-value systems.
Architecture Development Method concept TOGAF TOGAF's iterative cycle for developing enterprise architecture, which is valuable as a checklist of concerns and harmful when followed literally.
Architecture Governance Model concept Architecture Governance The definition of which architectural decisions require which level of scrutiny, and who holds the authority for each.
Architecture Review Board ARB, Design Authority practice Enterprise Architecture A forum that reviews significant designs against standards, risks and strategy before commitment.
Architecture Roadmap practice Architecture Roadmaps A sequenced plan of architectural change expressed as capability outcomes and decision points rather than as a fixed timeline of projects.
Behavioural Specification Gap Structure-Only Reference, Diagram-Level Standard concept Reference Architectures The omission in a reference architecture that specifies components and call directions but not behaviour under failure - so every team that complies invents the same timeout and retry defaults and produces the…
Boundary-Crossing Count Teams Per Feature, Coordination Metric metric EA Metrics The number of teams that must change to deliver a median feature - the most revealing and least used architecture metric, because it measures whether boundaries match the way work arrives.
Capability Decomposition Depth Capability Map Depth, Capability Level Choice concept Capability Maps in EA The level at which a capability map stops describing what a business does and starts describing how it is currently organised - the point past which it must be redrawn at every reorganisation and its refresh c…
Capability Map tool Capability Maps in EA A stable, technology-neutral model of what a business does, used as the frame for assessing systems, investment and duplication.
Capability-to-Application Mapping practice Capability Maps in EA Linking each business capability to the systems that support it, which is what converts two inventories into an analysis tool.
Capital One's Data Centre Exit case-study Enterprise Architecture A major US bank closed all eight of its data centres and moved fully to public cloud, treating governance automation as the enabling technology rather than a constraint.
Coordination-Cost Metric Services Per Change, Teams Per Feature, Lockstep Ratio practice EA Metrics The number of independently-owned services and teams that must change together for a typical feature - the clearest available signal that architectural boundaries are imposing delivery cost, and one almost nob…
Decision Rights Boundary Decision Scope Line, Local Versus Enterprise Decision concept EA Domains The line separating choices a team may make alone from choices that bind other teams - drawn by where the consequence of a mistake lands, not by the cost, size or difficulty of the decision.
EA Domain Layers concept EA Domains The four conventional layers of enterprise architecture — business, data, application and technology — each answering a different question about the estate.
EA Domains concept EA Domains The four conventional views of an enterprise — business, data, application, technology — and what each is actually for.
EA Framework Selection practice EA Frameworks Choosing how much formal enterprise architecture method an organisation needs, on the basis that most need considerably less than the frameworks describe.
EA Frameworks concept EA Frameworks The available enterprise architecture frameworks, what each contributes, and the common failure of adopting one wholesale.
EA Metrics metric EA Metrics Measuring whether an architecture practice is producing value — where output metrics mislead and outcome metrics are harder but real.
EA Value Metrics metric EA Metrics Measures that demonstrate what an enterprise architecture function has changed, chosen to avoid rewarding documentation volume.
Enterprise Architecture EA Practice, Architecture Function practice Enterprise Architecture The practice of owning the architectural decisions whose costs and benefits land on different teams or outside any team's planning horizon - the decisions competent delivery teams have no incentive or informat…
Enterprise Integration concept Enterprise Integration How applications across an estate exchange data — where the topology matters more than the technology and canonical models are the recurring trap.
Exception Register Waiver Log, Standard Deviation Record practice Technology Standards A record of every deviation from a standard, with approver, rationale and review date - which makes violations deliberate rather than silent and tells you whether the standard describes the right rule.
Exception Union Requirements Union, Consolidation Scope Creep concept Application Rationalisation The failure mode of consolidation programmes in which the replacement system inherits the union of every source system's local exceptions, making it more complex than any system it replaces.
Executable Reference Architecture Service Template, Golden Path Template pattern Reference Architectures A template that generates a working, compliant, observable, deployable service - replacing a reference document with something teams adopt because it is the fastest way to start.
Golden Path Paved Road, Service Template, Supported Path pattern Paved Roads A generated, fully-configured starting point for a new service that arrives with observability, pipeline, identity, ownership and cost attribution already in place - making the compliant path the fastest one r…
Golden Path Adoption metric Paved Roads The proportion of teams voluntarily using the supported path, which is the honest measure of whether a platform is solving real problems.
Governance Operating Model concept Architecture Governance The arrangement of decision rights, review points and automated controls through which architectural intent is maintained across an organisation.
Governed Exception Waiver, Standards Exception practice Technology Standards A deliberate, scoped, time-limited departure from a standard, recorded with an owner - which is always better than the ungoverned workaround it prevents.
InnerSource practice InnerSource Applying open-source collaboration practices inside an organisation, so teams can contribute to code they do not own instead of waiting for it.
InnerSource Contribution Contract Contribution Contract, InnerSource Maintainer Contract practice InnerSource The published statement of what a shared internal component accepts what it refuses and how fast it will answer - which makes a maintainer's "no" fast and survivable instead of turning openness into an unbound…
Integration Change Amplification Counterparty Fan-Out, Schema Change Blast Radius metric Enterprise Integration The number of independently owned systems that must change when one system revises its interface - the measure that decides whether an integration estate is expensive to change, and the one that a hub is meant…
Integration Landscape concept Enterprise Integration The inventory of connections between systems, which is usually larger, less documented and more expensive than the application inventory itself.
Integration Log of Record Log as Source of Truth, Monolog Pattern pattern Enterprise Integration An ordered, retained log that every consuming system reads from, replacing point-to-point integrations so that a new consumer can rebuild its entire view by replaying history instead of negotiating a back-fill.
Machine-Checkable Standard Executable Standard, Automated Conformance Rule practice Architecture Governance An architecture rule written so that a program can decide whether a change complies, enforced at merge or deploy time, which is the only form of governance whose capacity scales with the rate of change.
Metadata-Driven Multi-Tenancy Shared-Table Multi-Tenancy, Metadata Schema pattern Application Architecture Holding each tenant's custom structures as metadata rows over one shared physical schema, so that customisation needs no DDL and one upgrade reaches every tenant at once.
Pace-Layered Application Strategy Pace Layering, PACE Layers practice Application Portfolio Management Sorting applications by how fast the business needs them to change - records slowly, differentiators quarterly, innovations weekly - and giving each layer its own governance funding and integration rules inste…
Paved Road Golden Path practice Enterprise Architecture A supported, opinionated default way to build and run a service, made easy enough that teams choose it rather than being required to.
Paved Roads Golden Path pattern Paved Roads A supported, opinionated default path that is the easiest way to do the right thing — governance by convenience rather than by mandate.
Platform Team Product Model practice Platform Teams Running an internal platform team with product management disciplines — users, roadmap, support, metrics — rather than as an infrastructure function.
Platform Teams concept Platform Teams Teams providing self-service internal capability to reduce the cognitive load on delivery teams — distinguished from a service desk by self-service.
Portfolio Assessment Matrix practice Application Portfolio Management Plotting each application on business value against technical quality, producing a disposition for every system in the estate.
Radar Ring Semantics practice Technology Radar The meaning attached to each ring of a technology radar, which determines whether it guides decisions or merely lists opinions.
Reference Architecture practice Enterprise Architecture A pre-approved, documented template for a recurring class of solution, so that similar problems do not get individually redesigned.
Reference Architecture concept Reference Architectures A pre-decided template for a recurring class of solution, capturing the decisions that do not need making again.
Reference Implementation practice Reference Architectures A working example of a reference architecture that teams can run, read and copy, as opposed to a document describing one.
Roadmapping practice Architecture Roadmaps Sequencing architectural change so that each step delivers value and is safe to stop after — rather than planning a destination nobody reaches.
Significance Trigger Review Trigger, Architecturally Significant Change practice Architecture Review Boards A pre-defined, published condition that requires architectural review - so that governance covers what matters and does not become a queue in front of everything else.
Spend Control Gate Funding Gate, Investment Approval Control practice Paved Roads Architecture governance applied at the point money is committed rather than at design review, so the conversation happens while the decision is still reversible and the centre has actual authority.
Standardisation Blast Radius Monoculture Exposure, Standard Concentration concept Technology Standards The property that a technology standard concentrates exposure as well as capability - one flaw in the standardised component applies to the whole estate - which turns the ability to change it everywhere at sho…
Standards Lifecycle practice Technology Standards Managing technology standards through explicit states with review dates, so the standard set reflects current reality rather than past decisions.
System of Record Authoritative Source, Golden Source concept EA Domains The single system authoritative for a business entity, from which all other copies derive - the absence of which is the dominant source of enterprise complexity.
Target-State Decay Architecture Plan Decay, Target Architecture Drift concept Architecture Roadmaps The rate at which an approved target architecture stops being correct - mostly for organisational reasons rather than technical ones - and the reason a plan with no review date turns into a set of case-by-case…
Technology Architecture concept Technology Architecture The platforms, infrastructure and runtimes the estate depends on — where the recurring architectural problem is obsolescence rather than choice.