Portfolio ↗

Quiz

2667 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 areas2667 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture78 Reliability & Resilience88 Observability81 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture95 Cost Architecture & FinOps92 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication91 Enterprise Architecture91 Legacy Modernization92 AI-Era Architecture86 Software Architecture & Engineering84 Architecture Patterns84 Architecture Decision-Making91 The Architect's Meta-Skills92 Delivery & Release Engineering93 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience92 Testing & Quality Architecture90 Data Platform Architecture88 Streaming & Real-Time Data93 Data Governance & Semantics81 Frontend & Experience Architecture91 Edge, Mobile & IoT88 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture90 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk88
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

56 questions in Architecture Patterns.

  1. API Gateway advanced

    A developer platform's API gateway has accumulated business logic and become a bottleneck for every team. What should be moved out, and what belongs there?

    2 min answer api-gatewayscopebottleneckdistributed-monolith
  2. API Gateway advanced

    A public API is being overwhelmed by a handful of clients. Where should rate limiting live, which algorithm, and how should limits differ across users, tenants, endpoints and infrastructure?

    3 min answer rate-limitinggatewaycloudflaremulti-tenancy
  3. API Gateway advanced

    A ticketing platform at Ticketmaster's on-sale peaks routes everything through one gateway. Gateway to BFF to inventory is three hops and each hop retries up to three times on a timeout or a 5xx. Inventory's p99 crosses its 400 ms timeout at 09:00:02. Walk the next ninety seconds and say where the limit actually has to live.

    3 min answer api gatewayretriesretry budgetadmission control
  4. Architecture Patterns advanced

    A design review proposes a system using service discovery, a message broker, CQRS, event sourcing and distributed locks for a workload expected to have a few thousand users. What would you simplify, and how would you justify it?

    2 min answer patternsover-engineeringsimplificationevidence
  5. 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
  6. Cell-Based Architecture advanced

    A SaaS platform has had three full outages this year, each affecting all customers. Propose an architectural response.

    2 min answer blast-radiuscellsavailability
  7. Cell-Based Architecture advanced

    A platform serving hundreds of millions of users adopts cell-based architecture. What does it buy that redundancy does not, and what does it cost?

    2 min answer cellsblast-radiusisolationcorrelated-failure
  8. Cell-Based Architecture advanced

    A platform with extreme peaks keeps having total outages caused by bad deployments and poisonous requests. Which pattern addresses this, and what does it cost?

    2 min answer dream11cellsblast-radiusisolation
  9. Cell-Based Architecture advanced

    Alibaba reported a peak of 583000 order creations per second during Singles' Day in 2020. A system that idles at a small fraction of that for 364 days cannot be validated by ordinary load testing. What does an organisation have to build to make that peak survivable, and where would copying it be a mistake?

    3 min answer alibabaflash salecapacityisolation
  10. Cell-Based Architecture advanced

    Your multi-tenant API assigns each customer to one of eight worker pools by hash. One customer's traffic pattern regularly degrades their pool. Improve it.

    2 min answer awsshuffle-shardingisolationmulti-tenancy
  11. Competing Consumers advanced

    A queue-backed worker pool processes image jobs. One consumer's process is alive and its health check passes, but it is blocked in a socket read to a storage service that never returns and has no timeout. Queue depth looks normal. What happens over the next hour and what would have caught it?

    3 min answer competing consumerslivenesstimeoutsqueue
  12. Competing Consumers advanced

    A team uses competing consumers to scale processing and discovers that ordering guarantees are broken. What happened, and what are the options?

    2 min answer segmentcompeting-consumersorderingpartitioning