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Quiz

62 questions of the kind that actually get asked — in interviews, in architecture review boards, and by the person who has to run the thing at 3 AM. Every answer states the trade-off rather than the slogan, and says when the obvious choice is the wrong one.

All areas62 Architecture Fundamentals2 Distributed Systems6 Data Architecture7 Cloud Architecture4 Networking3 API & Integration Architecture1 Reliability & Resilience4 Observability3 Performance & Capacity Engineering3 Security Architecture3 Cost Architecture & FinOps3 Business Architecture2 Architecture Communication2 Enterprise Architecture1 Legacy Modernization2 AI-Era Architecture3 Software Architecture & Engineering3 Architecture Patterns3 Architecture Decision-Making6 The Architect's Meta-Skills1
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

62 questions.

  1. AI-Era Architecture intermediate Multiple choice

    A client wants an assistant that answers questions from 50,000 internal documents which change weekly. RAG or fine-tuning? What actually determines the quality?

    2 min answer ragllmretrievalarchitecture
  2. AI-Era Architecture advanced

    An LLM feature that worked last week now gives worse answers. Nothing was deployed. How do you find out what changed, and what should have been in place?

    2 min answer prompt-managementevaluationversioningllm
  3. AI-Era Architecture advanced

    You are asked to give an internal AI agent access to the customer database, the ticketing system and outbound email so it can resolve support tickets. What is your response?

    2 min answer agentssecurityprompt-injectionhitl
  4. API & Integration intermediate Multiple choice

    You are designing APIs for a platform with a web app, a mobile app, internal service-to-service traffic and third-party partners. What do you expose, and where?

    2 min answer restgraphqlgrpcapi-design
  5. Architecture Fundamentals intermediate

    A team shows you a design with eight services. Without knowing the domain, what questions tell you whether the boundaries are right?

    2 min answer couplingcohesionboundariesreview
  6. Architecture Fundamentals intermediate

    Instagram served 14 million users with three engineers on Django and Postgres. What does that tell you about how to choose an architecture for a new product?

    2 min answer case-studyinstagramsimplicitypragmatism
  7. Architecture Patterns intermediate

    Design a URL shortener handling 100 million new links per month and 10 billion redirects. Where is the real difficulty?

    2 min answer system-designcachingscalingstorage
  8. Architecture Patterns intermediate Multiple choice

    Orders must trigger inventory reservation, a confirmation email, an analytics record and a fraud check. Queue, topic, or both — and what breaks if you choose wrong?

    2 min answer pubsubqueuesevent-drivencompeting-consumers
  9. Architecture Patterns advanced Multiple choice

    Prime Video reported a 90% cost cut by consolidating a serverless distributed service into one process. Does that mean microservices were the wrong choice, and what is the actual decision rule?

    2 min answer case-studymicroservicesserverlesscost
  10. Business Architecture intermediate

    A startup asks you to architect their product "to handle millions of users". They currently have none. What do you actually build?

    2 min answer time-to-marketpragmatismconstraintsproduct
  11. Business Architecture advanced

    Southwest cancelled about 16,700 flights in December 2022 when crew scheduling could not recover from a storm, after years of deferred modernisation. How do you make that argument before the failure rather than after?

    3 min answer technical-debtriskmodernizationcase-study
  12. Cloud Architecture intermediate

    A team tells you backups run nightly and are retained for 30 days. What is missing from that answer?

    2 min answer backupdisaster-recoveryverificationransomware