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Glossary
Definitions of the terms used across Brunel and its documentation, from ADR and blueprint to tier, SKU and verifiable credential.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| ADR | Architecture decision record: one significant decision, its context, the options and the consequences |
| Assumption | A usage value (egress, logs, requests…) used to price usage-based services; editable |
| Blueprint | The provider-agnostic design: four tiers of components with their configuration and justification |
| Catalog | A provider's prices for one month and region, with sources and exchange rate |
| Component | One building block of a tier: a database, a container service, a CDN… |
| Context | What the code cannot tell: traffic, budget, availability, compliance, provider |
| Deterministic architect | Brunel's rule-based designer, used without AI |
| Evidence | The file, lines and excerpt that prove a fact |
| Fact | Something true about a repository, found by a detector |
| GitHub App | The optional Brunel app an organization installs to grant per-repository access |
| GitHub OIDC | Keyless authentication of GitHub Actions to AWS |
| MCP | Model Context Protocol: how AI agents call external tools |
| Project | One repository conversation with its analyses and versions |
| RPO / RTO | Recovery point / time objective: data you could lose, time to recover |
| SKU | The exact product a provider bills (e.g. an instance type) |
| Tier | One of the four architectures: Starter, Growth, Scale, Enterprise |
| Tracking | Re-analysis of a repository on every push |
| Verdict | Redesign, evolve or keep the current setup |
| Verifiable credential | A signed, machine-checkable statement; Brunel certificates are Open Badges 3.0 credentials |
| Version | An immutable snapshot of a design, with its parent and diff |