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Quiz

174 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 areas174 Architecture Fundamentals5 Distributed Systems26 Data Architecture23 Cloud Architecture19 Networking17 API & Integration Architecture13 Reliability & Resilience9 Observability8 Performance & Capacity Engineering6 Security Architecture16 Cost Architecture & FinOps3 Business Architecture2 Architecture Communication2 Enterprise Architecture1 Legacy Modernization2 AI-Era Architecture3 Software Architecture & Engineering3 Architecture Patterns6 Architecture Decision-Making9 The Architect's Meta-Skills1
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

118 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. Alert Fatigue advanced

    Your team receives 200 pages a week and the on-call rotation has lost two engineers in six months. Fix it.

    2 min answer alertingon-callburn-rateculture
  4. APIs as Products advanced

    You must make a breaking change to an API used by 200 internal services and 40 external partners. Design the change and the migration.

    2 min answer versioningdeprecationmigrationcontracts
  5. Rate Limiting advanced

    Design rate limiting for a multi-tenant API where a single customer's traffic spike currently degrades service for everyone.

    2 min answer rate-limitingmulti-tenantfairnesstoken-bucket
  6. 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
  7. Auditability advanced

    Design the audit logging for a system handling financial transactions. What is logged, where does it go, and what makes it hold up?

    2 min answer auditintegrityretentioncompliance
  8. Authentication advanced

    You must roll out MFA to 40,000 employees. Security wants hardware keys; the service desk fears the call volume. Design the rollout.

    2 min answer mfaphishing-resistantrolloutrisk
  9. Authorization advanced

    A document collaboration product needs sharing with individuals, teams, and inherited folder permissions. Which authorization model?

    2 min answer authorizationrebacrbacmodelling
  10. Autoscaling advanced

    A service autoscales on CPU. During incidents it never scales out, even as latency triples. Why, and what would you scale on instead?

    2 min answer autoscalingmetricssaturation
  11. Availability Zones advanced

    One availability zone becomes unavailable. Walk through what happens to a typical three-tier application and what you would have changed.

    2 min answer zonesfailuresingle-points
  12. 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