Quiz

2627 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 areas2627 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture77 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture78 Reliability & Resilience88 Observability81 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture85 Cost Architecture & FinOps82 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication91 Enterprise Architecture91 Legacy Modernization82 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

38 questions in Architecture Fundamentals.

Quiz

A metadata-driven API layer generates queries over a customer's database. A customer writes a deeply nested query that produces a catastrophic join. Is that an abstraction failure, and what should the design do about it?

A team proposes wrapping every cloud provider SDK behind an internal abstraction so the company could migrate providers later. Evaluate the proposal.

Design the abstraction boundary for a "vote" on a large discussion platform where a handful of threads receive an enormous share of all votes. What should the interface promise, what must it hide, and what must it refuse to hide?

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?

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?

Two teams write to the same set of database tables from two separately deployed services. List the problems this creates and describe how you would evolve out of it.

A fintech has a central architecture group producing designs that delivery teams then implement, and the designs keep arriving late and slightly wrong. What is the structural problem?

Interview prompt. You are the only architect supporting eleven stream-aligned teams. Every design document waits on your review, median wait is nine days, and teams have started shipping without it. The CTO offers to hire two more architects. Tell me what you do.

You are the first architect at a 120-engineer company with no architecture function. What do you do in the first ninety days?

A developer-deployment platform must run builds, schedule long-lived services, stream logs and provision databases. Which architectural style fits, and what is the most common mistake in choosing?

You are choosing an architecture style for a new B2B SaaS product. Six engineers. Enterprise customers with data residency requirements in three regions. Which style and why?