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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

45 questions in Architecture Decision-Making.

  1. Build vs Buy advanced

    Your company needs a feature flag and experimentation platform. A vendor charges a substantial annual fee; a team estimates six weeks to build one. Decide.

    2 min answer build-buytcodifferentiationdecision
  2. Centralised vs Distributed advanced

    A marketplace expanding across cities must decide what is centralised and what is devolved. What principle draws the line?

    2 min answer urban-companycentralisationautonomyconfiguration
  3. Centralised vs Distributed advanced

    Eight product teams each call a shared entitlements service on every request. A four-person platform team owns it. It measured 99.95% availability over the last year and answers in 8 ms at p99. Leadership now wants feature-flag evaluation moved into the same service because it would be one place to change. What does that centralisation buy, and when does the bill arrive?

    2 min answer centralisationavailabilityfeature-flagsentitlements
  4. Centralised vs Distributed advanced

    Lyft open-sourced Envoy in September 2016 after running it internally, moving retries, timeouts, service discovery and network telemetry out of its services and into a sidecar proxy. Which problem did centralising the network layer solve that a shared client library could not, and what did the sidecar cost?

    2 min answer lyftenvoyservice-meshsidecar
  5. Centralised vs Distributed advanced

    When does a shared platform stop helping and start constraining, and what signal tells you?

    2 min answer platformcentralisationbottleneckautonomy
  6. Strong vs Eventual Consistency advanced

    A booking platform must decide where strong consistency is required. How should the decision be made, and how is it communicated to application developers?

    2 min answer consistencyinvariantsguaranteescommunication
  7. Strong vs Eventual Consistency advanced

    A flash sale puts 500 units of one product in front of 200,000 concurrent shoppers. Design the inventory path.

    2 min answer retailhot-keyinventorycontention
  8. Strong vs Eventual Consistency advanced

    A grocery marketplace shows store availability from a read model fed by change-data-capture streams from each retailer's inventory system. Normal lag is 2 to 4 seconds. During the Saturday peak the stream backs up to 90 seconds and stays there for 20 minutes. Nothing errors and no alert fires. What happens, and which mechanism stops it?

    3 min answer consistencycdcstalenesssubstitutions
  9. Strong vs Eventual Consistency advanced Multiple choice

    A lodging marketplace must show accurate availability across search, listing pages and booking. Which of these need strong consistency?

    2 min answer airbnbconsistencyinventorysearch
  10. Strong vs Eventual Consistency advanced

    Which operations in a ticketing system need strong consistency and which are correct with eventual consistency?

    2 min answer consistencyinvariantsper-operationinventory
  11. Architecture Decision-Making advanced

    An architecture review reveals a proposed system requiring service discovery, several databases, distributed locks, a message broker, CQRS, event sourcing, a container orchestrator and a service mesh - for a workload expected to have a few thousand users. What would you simplify and how would you justify it?

    2 min answer zeptoover-engineeringsimplicityjustification
  12. Architecture Decision-Making advanced

    An organisation makes architectural decisions slowly and revisits them repeatedly. What structural changes improve decision quality and speed together?

    2 min answer decision-makingdecision-rightsreversibilityevidence