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

3 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Cold-Start Amortisation Warm Affinity, Startup Cost Reduction	practice	Serverless	Attacking the startup cost itself - through snapshots, lazy image pulls, local artefact caches and affinity routing - rather than choosing between scaling strategies that all suffer from it.
Serverless Cold Start	concept	Serverless	The additional latency when a function invocation must allocate and initialise a new execution environment rather than reusing a warm one.
Serverless Compute in Practice Functions as a Service, FaaS	concept	Serverless	Compute billed per invocation with no capacity to manage — excellent for bursty low-duty-cycle work, expensive and constrained for sustained load.