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

117 questions.

Quiz

Why is the system context diagram usually the most valuable single diagram, and what is most often left off it?

A team merges to trunk several times a day and the main branch's build is broken for two or three days at a time. They have a CI server, a large test suite and a merge queue. Which change restores continuous integration?

A quarterly access review is documented, approved and assigned an owner. The evidence shows it was performed in January and in September, and not in the other two quarters. The auditor calls the control ineffective. The owner argues the control is well designed. Who is right?

A customer reports an error at 14:32 yesterday. What must have been built for the investigation to take two minutes rather than two hours?

Every feature branch gets its own environment - one small always-on service, a managed NAT gateway, a load balancer and a small managed database. Roughly what does one idle environment cost per month at 2026 cloud list prices, and what does that imply for 60 open branches?

A team masks national identity numbers inside each BI tool's data model so analysts see only the last four digits. Security asks them to move the masking into the warehouse instead. Why does the location of the rule matter more than the rule itself?

An analyst can query the customer table. A regulator asks whether she was allowed to use it for the marketing model she built. Role-based access answers one of those questions and not the other. What is the difference between role-, attribute- and purpose-based access, and what does purpose add?

A 6 TB order history must be backfilled into a new store before cutover. The link sustains 1 Gbps and the target ingests about 40 MB/s per writer. Roughly how long is the backfill, and which assumption decides whether it fits one weekend?

A supplier table has 12% of rows with a blank tax identifier and 3% where the identifier is present but does not match the registry. Both are called data quality issues in the same report. Why does separating them change who is asked to fix them?

A team plans to move 2.5 TB to a new database by taking the application offline at 22:00 on Saturday, restoring a backup into the new store, and switching over by 08:00 Sunday. The data copies fine in a test at one tenth the volume. Why does this plan usually fail before it is executed?