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

56 questions in Architecture Patterns.

Quiz

A read-heavy query is too expensive to compute on demand. Compare a database materialized view, an application-maintained read model and a stream-processed view, and describe how each handles staleness and rebuild.

A ride-hailing platform maintains a materialised view of driver availability by geographic cell. What are the design decisions, and what breaks?

Your social feed precomputes each user's timeline when someone they follow posts. An account with 40 million followers joins. What breaks and how do you fix it?

A multi-step business process spans several services. When should it be orchestrated by a coordinator and when choreographed through events, and how do you tell which one you already have?

A workflow spans eight services using event choreography. Nobody can answer "where is order 41,229 stuck?". What do you change?

A workflow spans several services. What is the practical rule for choosing orchestration or choreography, and what is the design tell?

An interviewer says - we run order fulfilment across six services with events and no coordinator. Last quarter about 0.4% of orders ended in a state nobody noticed for days. Do not tell me to add tracing. What structural change do you make, and who gets paged?

An order flows through payment, restaurant acceptance, courier assignment and delivery. Should the coordination be orchestrated or choreographed?

A financial platform needs state changes to reliably produce events. When is the transactional outbox the right choice and when is change data capture better?

A service must update its database and publish an event, and both must happen or neither. Why is a dual write wrong, and how do the outbox pattern and log-based capture compare?

Orders are occasionally created in the database with no corresponding event reaching the warehouse. No errors are logged. Diagnose and fix.

A chat platform uses publish/subscribe to deliver messages to connected clients. What breaks when a channel has a million members, and what changes?