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Quiz

179 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 areas179 Architecture Fundamentals5 Distributed Systems26 Data Architecture23 Cloud Architecture19 Networking17 API & Integration Architecture13 Reliability & Resilience9 Observability8 Performance & Capacity Engineering6 Security Architecture16 Cost Architecture & FinOps4 Business Architecture2 Architecture Communication3 Enterprise Architecture2 Legacy Modernization3 AI-Era Architecture3 Software Architecture & Engineering3 Architecture Patterns6 Architecture Decision-Making9 The Architect's Meta-Skills2
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

123 questions.

  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. Managed Services advanced

    A team wants to self-manage Kafka on Kubernetes to save money against the managed service. Evaluate.

    2 min answer managed-servicestcooperations
  6. Modularity advanced

    A team is splitting a monolith into services. How do you decide where the boundaries go?

    3 min answer boundariescouplingcohesionconway
  7. Multi-Region Architecture advanced

    Leadership asks for multi-region "for resilience". What do you establish before designing anything?

    2 min answer multi-regionrtorporequirements
  8. NAT & Egress advanced

    A service intermittently times out connecting to a managed database. The database is healthy, nothing changed, and failures correlate with traffic volume. Where do you look?

    1 min answer natportsconnection-poolingprivate-endpoints
  9. API Gateways advanced

    Your API gateway configuration has grown to 8,000 lines with request transformations and cross-service orchestration. Changes require a platform team ticket and take two weeks. How do you fix this?

    2 min answer api-gatewaycouplingplatformtimeouts
  10. Network Performance advanced

    A global SaaS product has a 200 ms p95 API budget. Users in Sydney see 900 ms against a single US-East deployment. The application team says the service responds in 40 ms. Who is right and what do you do?

    2 min answer latencyrttglobalcdn
  11. Network Troubleshooting advanced

    After moving a service behind a VPN to an on-premises system, small API calls succeed and large responses hang indefinitely. Walk through the diagnosis.

    2 min answer mtuvpnicmptroubleshooting
  12. Networking advanced

    In the October 2021 Meta outage, engineers reportedly struggled to physically access equipment because the access-control systems were also down. What class of dependency is that, and how do you find yours?

    2 min answer bgpdnsdependenciesout-of-band