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

47 questions in Meta-Skills.

Quiz

An organisation finds most incidents are caused not by individual service failures but by interactions between healthy services. What discipline addresses this, and what specifically should be done?

An organisation finds most incidents are caused not by individual service failures but by unexpected interactions between healthy services. What does systems thinking add here?

The same class of incident has recurred four times in a year despite each postmortem producing actions that were completed. What is going wrong?

You add an approval gate to reduce production defects. Six months later defect rates are higher. Explain.

What changes when you move from making architectural decisions to being responsible for how an organisation makes them?

You are the first architect at a 200-engineer company with no architecture function. What do you do in the first three months?

You join a platform group and find four teams have each written their own retry-and-backoff library, with different defaults, and a fifth team has none. Everyone knows this is duplicated. Nobody has consolidated it. What is the diagnosis, and what do you change?

Dropbox moved file storage off Amazon S3 onto its own infrastructure - Magic Pocket - completing the migration in 2016. What did that decision buy and what did it pay, and which facts about your own situation would have to be true before the same move is defensible?

Product requires strong consistency and p99 latency under 100 ms for a globally distributed user base. Both are non-negotiable. What do you do?