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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. Data Lakes & Lakehouses advanced

    You are asked to choose between a cloud data warehouse and a lakehouse for a new analytics platform. How do you decide?

    2 min answer lakehousewarehouselock-indecision-making
  2. Data Lifecycle & Retention advanced

    A GDPR erasure request arrives for a customer. Where does their data actually live, and what makes this expensive to retrofit?

    2 min answer gdprerasureprivacylifecycle
  3. Data Warehousing advanced

    A finance report double-counts revenue after a new fact table is added. What is the likely modelling error?

    2 min answer warehousegrainfan-outdimensional-modelling
  4. Debugging Distributed Systems advanced

    A platform of 40 services has logs only, and incidents take hours to diagnose. Design the observability strategy and its rollout order.

    2 min answer observabilitytracingmetricsrollout
  5. Architecture Decision-Making advanced

    Netflix built its own CDN; Dropbox moved storage off S3. Both are usually wrong. What conditions made them right, and how do you test for those conditions?

    2 min answer case-studybuild-vs-buynetflixdropbox
  6. Distributed Locking advanced

    Three designs need distributed locks: a nightly report, a per-customer state machine, and a global config reload. For each, is a lock the right answer?

    2 min answer lockingpartitioningidempotencydesign
  7. Distributed Systems advanced

    A 43-second network partition caused GitHub over 24 hours of degraded service in 2018. How does a 43-second event become a day-long incident?

    2 min answer failoversplit-brainconsistencycase-study
  8. Distributed Systems advanced Multiple choice

    A card payment authorisation service runs active-active across two regions. A network partition splits them. Do you keep accepting authorisations, and what breaks either way?

    2 min answer capconsistencypaymentsavailability
  9. Distributed Systems advanced

    A downstream service slows from 50 ms to 3 s. Within two minutes every service in the request path is down, including ones that do not call it. Explain the mechanism and how you would have prevented it.

    2 min answer cascading-failureretriestimeoutsresilience
  10. Distributed Tracing advanced

    You are introducing distributed tracing across 40 services owned by 12 teams. Plan the adoption.

    2 min answer tracingopentelemetryadoptionsampling
  11. Distributed Transactions advanced

    Placing an order must reserve stock, charge the card and create a shipment across three services. Design it, and justify why not a distributed transaction.

    2 min answer sagatransactionspivotcompensation
  12. DNS advanced

    Your DR plan assumes a 60-second DNS TTL gives 60-second failover. Traffic to the failed region continues for 20 minutes. Explain and design something better.

    2 min answer dnsfailoverttlanycast