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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. Incident Management advanced

    Incidents at your company are chaotic: unclear ownership, no communication, and postmortems that produce nothing. Design the improvement.

    2 min answer incidentrolesseveritypostmortem
  2. Security Incident Response advanced

    Anomalous access to a customer database is detected. Walk me through the first day, and say what determines whether you can answer the regulator.

    2 min answer incident-responsebreachforensicsnotification
  3. Kubernetes advanced

    One service restarts unpredictably; another is slow with low CPU. Both run on Kubernetes. What are you looking at?

    2 min answer kuberneteslimitsthrottlingoom
  4. Landing Zones advanced

    An organisation is starting cloud adoption. Three teams want to deploy next month. What must exist first, and what can wait?

    2 min answer landing-zonegovernancesequencing
  5. Leader Election advanced

    A nightly job occasionally runs twice, producing duplicate charges. The team proposes a distributed lock. What do you say?

    2 min answer leader-electionlockingidempotencyfencing
  6. Leader Election advanced

    Your cluster fails over spuriously under load, but a real leader failure takes 45 seconds to detect. How do you resolve the tension?

    2 min answer leader-electionfailoverdetectiontuning
  7. Legacy Integration advanced

    A core mainframe system with no API supports nightly batch file exchange only. The business needs near-real-time order status. Design the integration.

    2 min answer legacycdcanti-corruption-layerstrangler
  8. Legacy Modernization advanced

    A 15-year-old monolith runs the core of the business. Leadership wants microservices. How do you approach it, and what would make you refuse?

    2 min answer stranglermodernizationmicroservicesrisk
  9. Legacy Modernization advanced

    TSB's 2018 core banking migration moved 1.9 million customers in a single weekend and failed publicly. What would you have required before approving that cutover?

    3 min answer migrationcutovertestingcase-study
  10. Load Shedding advanced

    One customer's batch job saturates a shared service and degrades everyone. Rate limiting them fixes it, until the next customer does the same. What is the structural answer?

    2 min answer multi-tenancyisolationadmission-controlfairness
  11. Load Shedding advanced

    Your service will exceed capacity by 30% during a known peak. Do you shed load or brown out, and how do you decide what goes first?

    2 min answer sheddingbrownoutdegradationprioritisation
  12. Load Testing advanced

    Your load tests pass consistently and production still falls over at peak. What is wrong with the tests?

    2 min answer load-testingworkload-modelstresssoak