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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. Functional vs Non-Functional beginner Multiple choice

    A marketplace ships saved-search alerts. The functional spec is one sentence - email a seller when a new listing matches their saved query - and it works. Six weeks after launch, alerts arrive anywhere between 4 minutes and 9 hours after the listing appears, and nobody can say whether that is a defect, because no one wrote down how fresh an alert had to be. Which of these is the missing non-functional requirement?

    2 min answer non-functional-requirementsfreshnessquality-attributeconstraints
  2. Functional vs Non-Functional beginner Multiple choice

    A news organisation's site is functionally simple - editors publish articles and readers read them - yet its architecture is unusually elaborate. Which non-functional characteristic explains that, and what structure does it force?

    2 min answer nfrcachingcdnread-heavy
  3. IaC Modules & Drift beginner

    You run `terraform plan` on a production workspace where nothing has been committed for three weeks. The plan proposes 23 changes. Nobody has touched the console. Why does this happen, and what should you do about each kind?

    3 min answer driftterraformprovidersdefaults
  4. Inner Loop & Outer Loop beginner Multiple choice

    Two teams own the same test suite. Team A can run the relevant tests locally in 40 seconds. Team B's only way to run them is a 9-minute pipeline. Team B's pull requests are about four times larger and when a test fails they take far longer to work out which change caused it. What is the mechanism connecting feedback time to those two outcomes and which change helps most?

    3 min answer inner loopfeedbackbatch sizetesting
  5. Lawful Basis & Purpose Limitation beginner Multiple choice

    A European travel marketplace of Booking.com's shape holds the same guest email twice: once captured at checkout so the booking confirmation can be sent, once captured at newsletter sign-up. The data team wants a single golden customer record and cannot see the objection. Which data model keeps the merge lawful?

    3 min answer purpose-limitationgolden-recordmdmconsent
  6. Layered Architecture beginner Multiple choice

    A design has four layers. The service layer contains no logic - it forwards every call from the controller to the repository. What would you change?

    2 min answer layeringover-engineeringsimplicitycritique
  7. Layered Architecture beginner

    A team's rule is that the domain layer must not import the persistence layer. Today the rule lives in a wiki page and in code review. What changes when the same rule becomes a check that fails the build, and what does the violation count over time tell you that today's count does not?

    3 min answer layeringdependency rulearchunitratchet
  8. Legacy Integration Patterns beginner

    A new notifications service needs customer contact data that only a twelve-year-old billing system holds. The team points it at a read replica of the billing database and ships in a week. Why does this work, and why is it still the most expensive integration they could have chosen?

    3 min answer integrationshared-databasecouplingschema-change
  9. LLM Application Architecture beginner Multiple choice

    Your chat endpoint streams tokens to the browser. A request fails after 300 of an expected 500 tokens are already on the user's screen. The team wants to apply the same automatic retry policy the rest of their API uses. Why is this different?

    3 min answer streamingretriesidempotencylatency
  10. Layer 4 vs Layer 7 beginner

    Six backends sit behind one load balancer: two in zone A and four in zone B. The zone A pair runs at 70% CPU while the zone B four sit at 25%. The load balancer's per-zone request counts are even and no target is unhealthy. What is happening?

    2 min answer load-balancingavailability-zonescross-zonecapacity
  11. Logging beginner

    A service emits one INFO log line per request and increments one counter per request. At 3,000 requests per second the two describe exactly the same traffic. Why does keeping the log cost orders of magnitude more than keeping the counter, and when is the log still the right thing to emit?

    3 min answer loggingmetricstelemetry costcardinality
  12. Medallion Architecture beginner

    A team proposes bronze, silver and gold layers for a pipeline that ingests one CSV daily and produces one report. Is that right?

    2 min answer pragmatismlayeringdesign