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With the fast-paced technology landscape, there are modern technical buzzwords every software architect encounters on a day-to-day basis. The purpose of this blog is to enlist the majority of these buzzwords that you should know as a software architect. These are coined by industry experts, technology companies, research firms, domain experts, cloud companies, and so on.
To ensure that we collaborate as a community, we have created a GitHub repository as well – feel free to contribute there. In the future, we will integrate this article with GitHub as a dynamically generated page so that this article acts as a living document.
For readability, these buzzwords or jargon have been categorized into different areas of architecture. The below list has been autogenerated from Vedcraft GitHub repository created to curate these buzzwords.
Process & Practices
Term |
Description |
Source |
Design Thinking |
It provides a structured process that helps innovators break free of counterproductive tendencies that thwart innovation |
HBR |
Industry 4.0 |
It encompasses a promise of a new industrial revolution—one that marries advanced manufacturing techniques with the Internet of Things to create manufacturing systems that are not only interconnected, but communicate, analyze, and use information to drive further intelligent action back in the physical world. |
Deloitte |
Service Design |
Service design helps to innovate (create new) or improve (existing) services to make them more useful, usable, desirable for clients and efficient as well as effective for organizations. It is a new holistic, multidisciplinary, integrative field. – Stefan Moritz |
Book by Adam Lawrence |
Software 2.0 |
Programmers are replaced by neural networks that use machine learning to develop software. It promises to unlock higher-order, edge use cases like autonomous vehicles, where the only way to progress is through AI models. |
McKinsey |
Architecture & Design
Term |
Description |
Source |
Evolutionary Architecture |
The term coined by ThoughtWorks. It is an evolutionary architecture supports guided, incremental change as a first principle across multiple dimensions. |
Book |
JAMStack |
Term coined by Netlify – It is s an architecture designed to make the web faster, more secure, and easier to scale. It builds on many of the tools and workflows which developers love, and which bring maximum productivity. |
jamstack.org |
Low-code platform |
Coined by Forrester – Low-code application platforms are software environments that speed development and delivery of new apps by changing two dimensions of traditional platforms – How business apps are developed and delivered & How development platforms are acquired and consumed. |
Forrester |
MSA (Microservices Architecture) |
is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms |
Martin Fowler |
Web 3.0 |
Berners-Lee coined the term to describe a web in which machines would process content in a humanlike way (i.e., a “Global Brain” where all data would be connected and understood both contextually and conceptually). |
Forbes |
User Experience & User Interface (UI)
Term |
Description |
Source |
Human-centered Design (HCD) |
It is an approach to problem solving, commonly used in design and management frameworks that develops solutions to problems by involving the human perspective in all steps of the problem-solving process. |
HCD |
Micro Frontends |
The term Micro Frontends first came up in ThoughtWorks Technology Radar at the end of 2016. It extends the concepts of micro services to the frontend world. The current trend is to build a feature-rich and powerful browser application, aka single page app, which sits on top of a micro service architecture. |
Micro-Frontends.org |
User-centered Design (UCD) |
User-centered design (UCD) is an iterative design process in which designers focus on the users and their needs in each phase of the design process. In UCD, design teams involve users throughout the design process via a variety of research and design techniques, to create highly usable and accessible products for them. There are subtle differences with human-centered design such as HCD focuses on humanity and human groups than specific users. |
Interaction Design |
Websocket API |
WebSocket API is an advanced technology that makes it possible to open a two-way interactive communication session between the user’s browser and a server. |
Mozilla |
WebAssembly |
WebAssembly is a new type of code that can be run in modern web browsers and provides new features and major gains in performance. It is not primarily intended to be written by hand, rather it is designed to be an effective compilation target for source languages like C, C++, Rust, etc. |
Mozilla |
Application, IoT & Services
Term |
Description |
Source |
gRPC |
gRPC is a modern open source high performance Remote Procedure Call (RPC) framework – built by Google – that can run in any environment. It can efficiently connect services in and across data centers with pluggable support for load balancing, tracing, health checking and authentication. It is also applicable in last mile of distributed computing to connect devices, mobile applications and browsers to backend services. |
gRPC |
Internet of Behaviours |
The Internet of Behavior can be considered as a combination of three fields viz. technology, data analytics, and behavioral science. |
IoTDesignPro |
Industrial IIoT |
The Industrial Internet of Things allows companies to integrate devices, sensors, and machines used for manufacturing processes and to enable a common platform for gathering and analyzing the data these sensors and devices record. |
McKinsey |
NATS |
NATS is a connective technology built for the ever increasingly hyper-connected world. It is a single technology that enables applications to securely communicate across any combination of cloud vendors, on-premise, edge, web and mobile, and devices. |
NATS |
Service Mesh |
A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer that you can add to your applications. It allows you to transparently add capabilities like observability, traffic management, and security, without adding them to your own code. |
Istio |
Security
Term |
Description |
Source |
Cybersecurity Mesh |
Cybersecurity mesh is a distributed architectural approach to scalable, flexible and reliable cybersecurity control. |
ResearchGate |
Identity as a service (IDaaS) |
It is cloud-based authentication built and operated by a third-party provider. IDaaS companies supply cloud-based authentication or identity management to enterprises who subscribe. |
Okta |
Supply Chain Attack |
Supply chain attack covers any instance where an attacker interferes with any stage of the software “manufacturing” process or a Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Examples are: Untrusted code libraries, Trojanized software update, Stolen code-signing certificates, etc. |
Sonatype |
SASE |
Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) – defined by Gartner – is a security framework prescribing the conversions of security and network connectivity technologies into a single cloud-delivered platform to enable secure and fast cloud transformation. SASE combines network security functions (such as SWG, CASB, FWaaS and ZTNA), with WAN capabilities (i.e., SDWAN) to support the dynamic secure access needs of organizations. |
Gartner |
Zero Trust Security |
Instead of assuming everything behind the corporate firewall is safe, the Zero Trust model assumes breach and verifies each request as though it originates from an open network. |
Microsoft |
Data Engineering
Term |
Description |
Source |
Data Lake |
A data lake is a centralized repository that allows you to store all your structured and unstructured data at any scale. You can store your data as-is, without having to first structure the data, and run different types of analytics—from dashboards and visualizations to big data processing, real-time analytics, and machine learning to guide better decisions. |
AWS |
Data Hub |
A data hub is a collection of data from multiple sources organized for distribution, sharing, and often subsetting and sharing. It differs from a data lake by homogenizing data and possibly serving data in multiple desired formats, rather than simply storing it in one place, and by adding other value to the data such as de-duplication, quality, security, and a standardized set of query services. |
Wikipedia |
Data Mesh |
Data mesh is an architectural and organizational paradigm that challenges the age-old assumption that we must centralize big analytical data to use it, have data all in one place or be managed by a centralized data team to deliver value. |
ThoughtWorks |
Data Fabric |
A platform for “orchestrating disparate data sources intelligently and securely in a self-service and automated manner to deliver a unified, trusted, and comprehensive real-time view of customer and business data across the enterprise. |
Forrester |
DataOps |
DataOps is a set of practices and technologies that operationalize data management and integration to ensure resiliency and agility in the face of constant change. It helps you tease order and discipline out of the chaos and solve the big challenges to turning data into business value. |
DataOps Summit |
Hybrid transaction/analytical processing (HTAP) |
Term coined by Gartner – It is an emerging application architecture that “breaks the wall” between transaction processing and analytics. It enables more informed and “in business real time” decision making |
Gartner |
Translytical Data Platform |
Term coined by Forrester (similar to Gartner’s HTAP) – is a unified database that supports transactions, analytics, operational insights and other workloads in real-time without sacrificing transactional integrity, performance or scale |
Forrester |
Cloud
Term |
Description |
Source |
As-a-Service |
Refers to something being presented to a customer, either internal or external, as a service, always in the context of cloud computing. Key examples are: - Content as a service
- Data as a service
- Desktop as a service
- Function as a service
- Infrastructure as a service
- Integration platform as a service
- Mobile backend as a service
- Network as a service
- Platform as a service
- Security as a service
- Software as a service
|
Wikipedia |
Cloud security posture management (CSPM) |
Term coined by Gartner – Forrester uses “Cloud Security Too” – It is a market segment for IT security tools that are designed to identify misconfiguration issues and compliance risks in the cloud. An important purpose of CSPM programming is to continuously monitor cloud infrastructure for gaps in security policy enforcement. |
Gartner |
Distributed Cloud |
Distributed cloud is where cloud services are distributed to different physical locations, but the operation, governance and evolution remain the responsibility of the public cloud provider. |
Gartner |
Serverless Framework |
To avoid cloud vendor lock-in Serverless Frameworks provide capabilities to build your own Serverless platform to provide Function-as-a-Service capability, which can be Cloud hosted or Hybrid-hosted. Examples are OpenFaaS, Kubeless, KNative, and Serverless. |
|
Infrastructure & DevOps
Term |
Description |
Source |
DevSecOps |
DevSecOps—short for development, security, and operations—automates the integration of security at every phase of the software development lifecycle, from initial design through integration, testing, deployment, and software delivery. |
IBM |
GitOps |
GitOps is an operational framework that takes DevOps best practices used for application development such as version control, collaboration, compliance, and CI/CD, and applies them to infrastructure automation. |
GitLab |
SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) |
SRE team is responsible for the availability, latency, performance, efficiency, change management, monitoring, emergency response, and capacity planning of their service(s). |
SRE Google Book |
Unikernel |
Unikernels are specialised, single-address-space machine images constructed by using library operating systems. |
Unikernel.org |
AI & Machine Learning
Term |
Description |
Source |
Feature Store |
Feature Store is an ML-specific data platform that addresses with fundamental capabilities: (1) it uses managed data pipelines to remove struggles with pipelines as new data arrives; (2) catalogs and stores feature data to promote discoverability and collaboration of features across models; and (3) consistently serves feature data during training and interference. |
ThoughtWorks |
ModelOps |
ModelOps (or AI model operationalization) is focused primarily on the governance and life cycle management of a wide range of operationalized artificial intelligence (AI) and decision models, including machine learning, knowledge graphs, rules, optimization, linguistic and agent-based models. |
Gartner |
MLOps |
MLOps is a subset of ModelOps. MLOps is focused on the operationalization of ML models, while ModelOps covers the operationalization of all types of AI models. |
ModelOp |