Learn AI ↗

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. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. Compliance Frameworks advanced

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

    2 min answer pciscopetokenisationcompliance
  6. Contract Testing advanced

    Integration failures between 30 services are found in a shared staging environment, days after merge. Propose a change.

    2 min answer contract-testingciintegrationorganisation
  7. 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
  8. CQRS advanced

    A team proposes CQRS with event sourcing for a new service. How do you evaluate the proposal?

    2 min answer cqrsevent-sourcingcomplexitydecision
  9. 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
  10. 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
  11. Data Architecture advanced

    Netflix personalises an entire home page in the time a TV takes to draw a screen. How, given that scoring every title for every member on request is impossible?

    2 min answer case-studynetflixprecomputationcqrs
  12. Data Architecture advanced Multiple choice

    Uber indexes the world with hexagons rather than squares for surge pricing and dispatch. Why does the shape matter, and what is the general lesson?

    2 min answer case-studyubergeospatialindexing