Portfolio ↗

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

1544 questions.

  1. Application Decomposition advanced

    A legacy system has no clean boundaries to extract — one shared database, entangled modules, no tests. What is the first move, and in what order should capability be recovered?

    3 min answer legacyseamscharacterisation-testsdecomposition
  2. Application Decomposition advanced

    A platform decomposes a monolith into services. Which boundaries should be extracted first, and which extraction produces a distributed monolith?

    2 min answer decompositionboundariescouplingdistributed-monolith
  3. Application Decomposition advanced

    During a monolith decomposition, the new search service needs data owned by five other services. What do you do?

    2 min answer airbnbdecompositiondata-ownershipcqrs
  4. Application Decomposition advanced

    How would you identify where to split a large application, using evidence rather than opinion?

    2 min answer decompositionchange-correlationseamsdata
  5. Application Portfolio Management advanced

    A retirement programme will switch off 23 of 140 applications this year. Eleven of them sit on an Oracle Database Enterprise Edition estate licensed by the Processor metric - 4 servers of 32 physical Intel cores each. The business case claims the retirements save 11/140 of the database licence and support cost. Estimate what is actually saved in year one and say which number should drive the retirement order.

    3 min answer application-portfoliolicence-costsoracledecommissioning
  6. Application Portfolio Management advanced

    An estate has 300 applications and the organisation cannot support them all. How do you decide what to retire?

    2 min answer portfolioretirementrationalisationevidence
  7. Architectural Drivers advanced Multiple choice

    A large ERP programme was designed around performance and integration. Eighteen months in it fails audit - not because it is slow or badly integrated, but because it cannot demonstrate who changed a financial record and why. Which architectural driver was missed, and why is this structural rather than a missing feature?

    1 min answer driversauditabilityerpsap
  8. Architectural Drivers advanced

    A system meets every SLO but the business is unhappy because feature delivery has slowed to a crawl. What is being measured wrongly, and when is reducing distribution the right scalability investment?

    2 min answer doracoordination-costdeliverydrivers
  9. Architecture Compliance Checks advanced

    Every infrastructure pull request passes the policy-as-code check. A quarterly scan finds 40 object storage buckets without the required encryption setting and 12 with public access. Nothing has been merged that would create them. Where is the gap?

    3 min answer policy as codedriftruntimeadmission control
  10. Architecture Compliance Checks advanced

    How can architectural standards be enforced automatically, and which standards genuinely cannot be?

    2 min answer governancepolicy-as-codefitness-functionsstandards
  11. Architecture Compliance Checks advanced

    How do you check that implemented systems match agreed architectural decisions, without a review board?

    1 min answer architecture-governancefitness-functionsautomationdrift
  12. Architecture Fundamentals advanced

    Prime Video's video-quality monitoring team moved from a serverless step-function pipeline back to a single long-running service and reported a large cost reduction. What actually changed, and which generalisation from this would be wrong?

    2 min answer prime-videoserverlessmonolithcost-per-request