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

4 terms shown.

Term	Kind	Topic	What it is
Reservation Ledger Stock Ledger, Reserve-Then-Commit	pattern	Transactions & Isolation	Modelling stock as an append-only sequence of reservations, releases and allocations rather than as a mutable count - so the number has a history, can be reconciled, and does not become a single point of contention.
Transactions and Isolation ACID Isolation Levels	concept	Transactions & Isolation	What a database guarantees when concurrent transactions touch the same data — and the anomalies each level permits.
Two-Phase Locking 2PL	protocol	Transactions & Isolation	The concurrency control protocol behind serializable isolation — acquire locks in a growing phase, release only in a shrinking phase, never interleaving the two.
Write Skew	concept	Transactions & Isolation	An anomaly where two transactions each read a set of rows, make disjoint writes based on what they read, and together violate an invariant neither could have broken alone.