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Quiz

98 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 areas98 Architecture Fundamentals2 Distributed Systems26 Data Architecture23 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

56 questions.

  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. Backpressure & Flow Control advanced

    A worker's queue depth grows steadily through the day and never recovers. Adding workers helps for an hour, then it resumes. What is happening?

    2 min answer backpressurecapacityqueues
  5. Bulkheads & Isolation advanced

    A service calls four dependencies. How do you size its thread pools, and why is the total often smaller than people expect?

    2 min answer bulkheadpoolslittles-lawsizing
  6. Bulkheads & Isolation advanced

    You are asked to make a multi-tenant SaaS resilient to "any single failure". You propose cells. What must you find before that claim is true?

    2 min answer cellsisolationblast-radiusdependencies
  7. 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
  8. CAP & PACELC advanced

    Classify DynamoDB, Spanner and Cassandra under PACELC, and say which half of the classification you would actually design around.

    2 min answer pacelcconsistencylatencydatastores
  9. CAP & PACELC advanced

    You run active-active across two regions. The link between them fails. What should each region do, and what would you have designed differently?

    2 min answer partitionquorummulti-regionavailability
  10. Change Data Capture advanced

    A downstream team needs to react to order changes. The order service can publish events, or they can consume CDC from its database. Which, and why?

    2 min answer cdceventscouplingintegration
  11. Circuit Breakers advanced

    After adding circuit breakers, a partial outage now lasts three times longer than it used to. What is likely happening?

    1 min answer circuit-breakerrecoveryoscillation
  12. Cloud Architecture advanced

    In the 2017 AWS S3 outage, the status page could not report the outage because it depended on S3. What does that tell you about designing status and control systems?

    2 min answer blast-radiuscontrol-planedependenciescase-study