ArchConf 2026

Attendees, exhibitors & solutions

Who this event is for

Industry trends

Key trends shaping this market and its wider industry.

Hotel tiers

A range of accommodation options near the venue and across key areas.

Local transport

Get around the city with these convenient transport options.

Frequently asked

Glossary

1

Architecture Decision Record (ADR)

A short, versioned document that captures one architectural decision, the context that forced it, the options considered and the consequences accepted. ADRs are commonly stored alongside the code so future maintainers can see why a design looks the way it does.

2

Bounded context

A domain-driven design boundary inside which a single model and ubiquitous language apply. Teams use bounded contexts to decide where a service boundary should sit and where a shared database becomes a coupling risk.

3

Modular monolith

A single deployable application whose internal modules are separated by explicit interfaces and enforced dependency rules. It is often chosen as a lower-operational-cost alternative to microservices when the domain boundaries are still being discovered.

4

Event-driven architecture

A design where components publish and consume events through a broker instead of calling each other directly. Architects weigh ordering, idempotency, schema evolution and replay strategy before adopting it.

5

CQRS

Command Query Responsibility Segregation separates the write model from one or more read models so each can be scaled and modelled independently. It usually appears alongside event sourcing, but the two are not the same thing.

6

Strangler fig pattern

An incremental migration technique in which new capability is built around a legacy system and traffic is shifted over piece by piece until the old component can be retired. It is the common counter-proposal to a full rewrite.

7

Fitness function

An automated check, such as a dependency rule test, latency budget or coupling metric, that tells a team whether the architecture still satisfies its intended characteristics. Fitness functions turn architectural intent into something CI can enforce.

8

Cell-based architecture

A deployment model that partitions a system into independent cells, each with its own compute and data footprint, to limit the blast radius of failure and to allow gradual rollout across the estate.

9

Observability

The ability to understand a system's internal state from its outputs, typically traces, metrics and structured logs. For architects it is a design property, not a monitoring product installed after launch.

10

Platform engineering

The discipline of building an internal platform, often with self-service golden paths, so product teams can ship without re-solving infrastructure and compliance work each time. Its success is usually measured by adoption and lead time, not ticket volume.

11

Service-level objective (SLO)

A target for a measured reliability indicator, such as the share of requests served under a latency threshold. SLOs give architecture trade-offs a numeric budget and drive decisions about redundancy and error handling.

12

Hexagonal architecture

Also called ports and adapters, this style places domain logic at the centre and pushes databases, queues and web frameworks to the edges behind explicit interfaces, so the core can be tested and replaced independently.

13

Data contract

An agreed, testable definition of the shape, semantics and quality guarantees of data exchanged between producers and consumers. Data contracts are how teams stop schema changes from silently breaking downstream services.

14

Saga pattern

A way to coordinate a long-running business transaction across services using a sequence of local transactions plus compensating actions, rather than a distributed lock or two-phase commit.