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

7 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Active-Active vs Active-Passive	concept	Multi-Region Architecture	Whether all regions serve traffic simultaneously, or one serves while another waits to take over — a choice about which failure mode you would rather have.
Entity Homing Home Region, Per-Entity Primary	pattern	Multi-Region Architecture	Assigning each entity - customer, account, tenant - a single home region that owns its writes, so a regional outage affects a subset of entities rather than every write in the system.
Global Traffic Management GSLB, Global Load Balancing	tool	Multi-Region Architecture	The layer that decides which region a given user reaches, using DNS, anycast or an edge network, and that performs regional failover.
Multi-Region Active-Active	pattern	Multi-Region Architecture	Serving live traffic from two or more regions simultaneously, which removes failover time and introduces distributed data problems permanently.
Multi-Region Architecture Regional Architecture Posture, Cross-Region Topology	concept	Multi-Region Architecture	Running a system in more than one cloud region, which is a ladder of four distinct postures with different costs and guarantees rather than a single property - and the posture a team needs is rarely the one it…
Netflix: Regional Evacuation Chaos Kong, Region Failover	case-study	Multi-Region Architecture	Netflix rehearses shifting all traffic out of an entire AWS region, which is what makes the capability real rather than documented.
Regional Evacuation Region Failover Drill	practice	Multi-Region Architecture	The deliberate, rehearsed act of shifting all traffic out of a region — treated as a routine operation rather than an emergency procedure.