Quiz

2627 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 areas2627 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture77 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture78 Reliability & Resilience88 Observability81 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture85 Cost Architecture & FinOps82 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication91 Enterprise Architecture91 Legacy Modernization82 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

53 questions in Reliability & Resilience.

Quiz

A team consistently exhausts its error budget and continues shipping features. What has gone wrong, and what would make the budget actually function?

How does an error budget actually change behaviour, what makes it fail in practice, and what should happen when it is exhausted?

A digital bank needs automatic failover for availability, but some operations cannot safely execute twice. Which components fail over automatically, which degrade, and which stop?

A load balancer health check is changed from "the process answers" to "the process can reach its database and its cache". The dependency has a brief regional problem. What happens to the fleet, and why do load balancers deliberately fail open?

A regional failover completes in 90 seconds per the runbook - the database is promoted and traffic is redirected - but the application stays broken for 25 minutes. The new region's services are healthy and idle. Where is the time going?

A search platform's index-serving region becomes degraded but not fully down - elevated latency and partial errors. Should traffic fail over automatically? Analyse the risks either way.

The business asks for multi-region active-active. Walk through the decision and what it actually requires.

Your database primary is unreachable from the monitoring system but is still serving some clients. Do you fail over?

A financial platform's card authorisation path must survive dependency failures, deployments, overloaded downstreams and partial network failures. How should isolation, deadlines, breakers, bulkheads, caching, shedding and fallback combine?

A security vendor pushes a content update to millions of endpoints simultaneously and a malformed file crashes them all at kernel level. What should have been in place, and why is "it was data, not code" the wrong defence?

What is the single highest-value fault isolation mechanism, and why is it usually missing?

A commerce platform prepares for its highest-traffic event of the year. What should a game day rehearse that ordinary load testing does not?