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Quiz

126 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 areas126 Architecture Fundamentals2 Distributed Systems26 Data Architecture23 Cloud Architecture19 Networking3 API & Integration Architecture1 Reliability & Resilience4 Observability3 Performance & Capacity Engineering3 Security Architecture16 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

77 questions.

  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. 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
  6. 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
  7. Cloud Architecture advanced

    The business asks for "multi-region" after a regional outage. Before agreeing, what do you need to establish, and what are you actually signing up for?

    2 min answer multi-regiondrcostconsistency
  8. Cloud Migration advanced

    You are asked to lead a migration of 300 applications to cloud. What happens in the first ninety days?

    2 min answer migrationdiscoverysequencingwaves
  9. Compliance Frameworks advanced

    PCI DSS assessment covers 40 systems and costs a fortune annually. How would you reduce that architecturally?

    2 min answer pciscopetokenisationcompliance
  10. Cost & FinOps advanced

    A design review presents a new event-driven platform. What cost questions do you ask before approving it?

    2 min answer finopscost-modelreviewegress
  11. Data Architecture advanced

    A multi-tenant SaaS product has outgrown one database. You must shard. How do you choose the partition key, and what makes this decision so expensive to get wrong?

    2 min answer shardingpartitioningmulti-tenancyscaling
  12. Data Architecture advanced

    Discord stores trillions of messages. What is their partition key, and what problem does the second half of it solve?

    2 min answer case-studydiscordpartitioninghot-partition