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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

130 questions.

  1. DNS beginner Multiple choice

    At 09:00 a team creates the DNS record for a new regional endpoint. It resolves from their laptops at once, but part of the fleet keeps getting NXDOMAIN until about 09:20 even though the record's TTL is 60 seconds. Why?

    2 min answer dnsnegative-cachingnxdomaincutover
  2. EA Domains beginner Multiple choice

    A team says a choice is "an enterprise architecture concern, not ours". What actually distinguishes an enterprise-level decision from a team-level one?

    2 min answer governanceautonomyboundariesdecision-scope
  3. EA Frameworks beginner

    A company of 900 engineers has no enterprise architecture function and every team designs its own systems competently. Which decisions are genuinely absent, rather than simply made elsewhere?

    3 min answer enterprise-architecturedecision-rightsstandardsea-function
  4. EA Frameworks beginner Multiple choice

    Fourteen teams produce architecture diagrams nobody can compare. The same rectangle means a single service in one diagram and an entire platform in another; arrows sometimes mean data flow and sometimes deployment. Leadership cannot answer which applications support the claims capability or which run on the estate leaving support next year. The CIO asks which EA framework to adopt. Which move addresses the actual problem?

    3 min answer ea-frameworksarchimatetogafzachman
  5. Edge Computing beginner Multiple choice

    A team moves request signing from one region to an edge platform. p50 falls from 140 ms to 35 ms and p99 rises from 220 ms to 900 ms. Error rate is unchanged and the platform reports no throttling. Which mechanism most likely explains the tail?

    3 min answer edge-computingdata-gravitycold-startcache
  6. Edge Security & Attestation beginner Multiple choice

    A gateway requires each device to prove it is running approved firmware. The device sends a signed measurement of its boot image, and the gateway verifies the signature against the device's registered key. Why is a valid signature not yet evidence that this device is trustworthy right now?

    2 min answer attestationtpmreplaynonce
  7. Embeddings beginner Multiple choice

    A support search drops any result scoring below 0.75 cosine similarity. The team re-embeds the whole corpus with a newer embedding model and rebuilds the index; now the same cutoff throws away almost every result. What is the mistake?

    3 min answer embeddingssimilaritycalibrationthresholds
  8. Encryption beginner Multiple choice

    An attacker obtains the application's database credential from a leaked environment file and runs a SELECT against the customer table. Every volume is encrypted at rest with a managed key service and every connection uses TLS. What does that encryption prevent here?

    3 min answer encryptionat restthreat modelaccess control
  9. Facilitation beginner

    Two teams meet for 60 minutes to agree who will own a shared notification capability. Everyone is prepared and the discussion is civil, and the meeting ends with "let us take this offline". Why does naming the decision-maker before the session change the outcome mechanically rather than politically?

    2 min answer facilitationdecision-rightsconsensusmeetings
  10. File Formats & Compaction beginner Multiple choice

    A team keeps three years of event data as gzipped CSV in object storage because it is simple and anything can read it. The table is now about 500 GB compressed and the daily dashboard query reads four of the 60 columns. What has the simplicity actually cost them?

    2 min answer csvparquetgzipsplittability
  11. First-Principles Reasoning beginner

    A product manager asks for a 25 ms round-trip response time for users in London talking to a service in New York, arguing that a faster network provider would deliver it. Roughly what is the physical floor, and what does the answer let you do?

    3 min answer latencyphysicsfirst-principlesestimation
  12. Flaky Test Management beginner Multiple choice

    One integration test fails only in CI, only on Tuesdays, only in the 00:30 UTC scheduled run. It passes locally and on every pull-request run. What do you look at first?

    2 min answer flaky-testsclockdiagnosisquarantine