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

42 questions in Software Architecture.

Quiz

At 14:05 a canary on 5% of traffic passes automated analysis across 60 metrics and is promoted. At 14:40 the fleet error rate is 12 times baseline. The canary's own dashboards were clean the entire time. What made the canary blind, and which design decision allowed it?

You roll back a deployment and the system is still broken. What are the likely reasons?

A team is splitting a service and discovers the split would break a transaction. What are the options, and which is usually right?

A team proposes extracting a service. What single test best predicts whether the boundary is right?

A team split a monolith into 14 services. Every feature now touches 4 or 5 of them, and releases are coordinated weekly. What would you change?

Netflix moved from a very large number of fine-grained microservices toward fewer, better-bounded services. What signals indicate that service boundaries are wrong, and how would you execute a consolidation safely?

A commerce platform runs a very large monolith serving enormous traffic and chooses not to decompose it into microservices. What must be true for that to be the right choice?

Knight Capital lost roughly $460M in 45 minutes in 2012 after a deployment reached seven of eight servers. Which architectural failures made that possible, and which one would you fix first?

Uber reached roughly 2,200 microservices and found the estate incomprehensible. Their fix was not consolidation. What was it, and why does it generalise?

You need to ship a rewrite of the pricing engine. Same inputs, same expected outputs, completely new implementation. How do you release it?

A developer-tools vendor of JetBrains' shape publishes a plugin API used by several thousand third-party plugins it does not control and cannot enumerate. An architect proposes consumer-driven contract tests. Which approach actually protects a release?

Consumer-driven contract testing is technically sound but adoption stalls. What organisational conditions does it require?