Terminology

2205 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 areas2205 Architecture Fundamentals77 Distributed Systems107 Data Architecture110 Cloud Architecture94 Networking88 API & Integration Architecture82 Reliability & Resilience75 Observability70 Performance & Capacity Engineering72 Security Architecture86 Cost Architecture & FinOps71 Business Architecture67 Architecture Communication67 Enterprise Architecture66 Legacy Modernization71 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 concept794 practice734 pattern368 metric125 case-study77 tool62 protocol45

6 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Admission Control	practice	Load Shedding	Deciding at the entrance whether to accept a request at all, based on whether the system can complete it within its deadline.
Brownout	pattern	Load Shedding	Deliberately reducing the quality or completeness of every response under load, rather than serving some requests fully and rejecting others.
Cloudflare 2019: One Regex, Global Outage Cloudflare WAF Outage	case-study	Load Shedding	A firewall rule containing a regular expression with catastrophic backtracking consumed CPU across Cloudflare's entire global network within seconds of deployment.
Load Shedding	pattern	Load Shedding	Deliberately rejecting a portion of incoming work so the system continues serving the remainder at acceptable latency, rather than degrading for everyone.
Priority Load Shedding Tiered Shedding, Criticality-Based Shedding, Selective Degradation	pattern	Load Shedding	Dropping traffic by declared business criticality under stress rather than uniformly or randomly, exploiting the fact that the highest-volume requests are usually the least valuable ones.
Priority Queueing	pattern	Load Shedding	Classifying requests by business importance so that overload sheds the least valuable work first rather than an arbitrary slice.