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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. Edge Computing advanced

    A team proposes moving personalisation to edge functions to cut latency. When does that work and when does it backfire?

    2 min answer edgelatencystatecaching
  2. Enterprise Architecture advanced

    You inherit an estate of roughly 400 applications, no reliable inventory, and a mandate to reduce cost and risk. What do you do in the first ninety days?

    2 min answer portfoliorationalisationgovernancemodernization
  3. Event-Driven Integration advanced

    An order service publishes events consumed by six teams. Every consumer immediately calls back for order details. What is wrong and what do you change?

    2 min answer eventspayload-designcouplingversioning
  4. Event Sourcing advanced

    A team wants event sourcing for a new order service, citing audit requirements. What do you recommend?

    2 min answer event-sourcingauditdecision-making
  5. Event Streaming advanced Multiple choice

    Consumer lag on a Kafka topic grows during peak and does not recover overnight. You add consumers and nothing improves. Why?

    2 min answer kafkapartitionsconsumer-groupslag
  6. Failover advanced

    The business asks for multi-region active-active. Walk through the decision and what it actually requires.

    2 min answer multi-regionfailoverconsistencycost
  7. Failure Modes advanced

    One instance in a fleet of fifty is returning correct responses very slowly. Health checks pass and it stays in rotation. How do you detect and handle this?

    2 min answer grey-failurehealth-checksdetectionmitigation
  8. Firewalls & Security Groups advanced

    Security requires default-deny egress across the estate. Engineering says it will cause constant outages. How do you deliver it?

    2 min answer egresszero-trustflow-logssecurity
  9. Fitness Functions advanced

    Architecture decisions in your organisation are either ignored or bottlenecked in a review board. Design something better.

    3 min answer governanceadrfitness-functionsprinciples
  10. GraphQL advanced

    A team is about to launch a public GraphQL API. What must be in place before it goes live?

    2 min answer graphqlsecurityperformancecaching
  11. HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 & HTTP/3 advanced

    You migrate a mobile API to HTTP/2 and p99 latency gets worse for users on cellular networks, while p50 improves. Explain and decide what to do.

    1 min answer http2http3quichead-of-line
  12. Idempotency Keys advanced

    A payments API must guarantee that a network retry never charges a customer twice. Design the mechanism end to end.

    2 min answer idempotencypaymentsretriesexactly-once