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.

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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