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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

38 questions in Architecture Fundamentals.

  1. Fitness Functions advanced

    In 2023 a team added a build rule forbidding the domain module from importing the persistence module, and it went green. In 2026 the domain module imports persistence in fourteen places and the build is still green. No one disabled the rule and no one edited it. Reconstruct how a passing check ended up protecting nothing.

    3 min answer fitness-functionsarchitecture-testingdriftsilent-failure
  2. Modularity advanced

    A team is splitting a monolith into services. How do you decide where the boundaries go?

    3 min answer boundariescouplingcohesionconway
  3. Modularity advanced

    A travel platform integrates hundreds of suppliers, each with different APIs, latencies, reliability and data quality. How should modularity be applied, and what specifically goes wrong in platforms that get this boundary wrong?

    2 min answer modularityintegrationsuppliersexpedia
  4. Quality Attributes advanced

    A streaming platform is adding scheduled live events to a catalogue service that has always served on-demand content. Which quality attributes change, and why is this not "the same system with more traffic"?

    2 min answer netflixlive-streamingquality-attributesdrivers
  5. Quality Attributes advanced

    You are starting a greenfield platform. How do you establish what the architecture must satisfy before designing anything?

    2 min answer driversquality-attributesconstraintsmethod
  6. Reference Models advanced

    Four years ago a platform team adopted a cloud vendor's landing-zone reference architecture whole: hub-and-spoke network, three subscription tiers, a central firewall appliance, a shared CI account. The estate turned out to be three products and 40 engineers. The appliance adds a 12 ms hop to every internal call and caused two of the last five incidents. Auditors were told the architecture "conforms to the vendor reference". Sequence the migration to a simpler topology without losing the audit story.

    3 min answer reference-modelslanding-zonetailoringaudit
  7. Requirements to Constraints advanced

    A short-video recommendation service was designed when a median session pulled 20 videos and feature computation took 40 ms. Two years later sessions pull 200 videos, the model is larger, and p99 recommendation latency has quietly tripled - yet no single change looks responsible. How do you diagnose this as a constraints problem rather than a code problem?

    2 min answer constraintscapacityrecommendationsbytedance
  8. Separation of Concerns advanced

    An AI inference platform handles authentication, quota accounting, prompt assembly, safety filtering, model invocation, token counting, billing emission and response streaming in one request handler. Latency is currently fine. Argue for or against separating these concerns, and identify which separations pay for themselves first.

    2 min answer separation-of-concernsinferenceanthropicscenario
  9. Separation of Concerns advanced

    An issue tracker with local-first behaviour keeps a client-side store, a sync engine, and a server. A product manager asks for a new field on an issue. In a well-separated design, how many places should change, and what does the answer tell you?

    1 min answer separation-of-concernslinearlocal-firstsync
  10. Technical Constraints advanced

    A quick-commerce platform's architecture is bounded by things that are not software: store leases, courier supply, road conditions, and the physical time to pick items off a shelf. How should such constraints enter the design?

    2 min answer constraintszeptophysical-worldquick-commerce
  11. Technical Constraints advanced

    A retailer's website must show whether an item is available in a nearby store. Store systems are occasionally offline and physical counts drift from recorded counts. How should availability be modelled?

    2 min answer constraintsinventoryconsistencywalmart
  12. Technical Constraints advanced

    An observability platform lets customers attach arbitrary tags to metrics. One customer adds a tag containing a request identifier. What would you change about the system's constraints, and why is "tell the customer not to do that" an insufficient answer?

    2 min answer constraintscardinalityobservabilitydatadog