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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. Records Retention & Legal Hold beginner

    A policy says customer records are deleted seven years after the relationship ends. A team implements it literally and still fails the audit. What actually starts the clock, and what does that force into the design?

    2 min answer retentiondeletionobject-lockcrypto-shredding
  2. Reference Data beginner

    An order total is stored as the integer 1000 alongside a currency code. In USD that is ten dollars. The same integer means one thousand yen in JPY and one dinar in KWD. A report sums the column across currencies and the total looks plausible. Why is this a reference-data problem rather than a bug in the report?

    3 min answer reference datacurrencyminor unitsiso 4217
  3. Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture beginner

    Marketing has signed with an analytics vendor and the vendor's SDK is due in next week's mobile release. Legal asks whether you are the controller or the processor for what that SDK collects. Why does the answer change the architecture rather than only the paperwork?

    2 min answer controllerprocessorsub-processorssdk
  4. Requirements to Constraints beginner

    A live-sport streaming service is planning for a cricket final. Marketing says "be ready for a big audience". The semi-final peaked at 1.8 million concurrent viewers and climbed from 400000 to 1.8 million in roughly 90 seconds at the first ball. Segments are 4 seconds long. Roughly what does the final demand, and which of those numbers actually constrains the design?

    3 min answer live-streamingpeak-event-readinesscapacity-planningautoscaling
  5. RTO & RPO beginner Multiple choice

    A team documents an RPO of 24 hours because backups run nightly at 02:00 and take about 40 minutes. The last restore was attempted at the time the system was built. What is the honest recovery point objective?

    3 min answer rpobackupsrestoreverification
  6. Security Testing in the Pipeline beginner

    A dependency scanner reports a critical vulnerability in a library your application includes. Reading the advisory, the flaw is in a parser your code never calls. Why does the scanner report it anyway, and what should that change about how you triage?

    3 min answer dependency-scanningsbomreachabilitytriage
  7. Self-Service Provisioning beginner Multiple choice

    Provisioning a database on this platform takes about 4 engineer-hours of real work. The median request takes 6 working days end to end. The platform team of 5 is fully occupied. Why is the lead time roughly twelve times the work time and which change reduces it most?

    3 min answer self-servicequeueinglead timeticket ops
  8. Separation of Concerns beginner Multiple choice

    A user signup request takes 4 seconds at p99. Tracing shows the handler sends a welcome email through a third-party API and writes to a CRM before returning. What is wrong architecturally?

    2 min answer separation-of-concernsasyncavailabilitycoupling
  9. Sidecar & Ambassador beginner Multiple choice

    A platform team rolls out sidecar proxies so every service gets mTLS without code changes. A month later an auditor captures traffic and finds one service still sending plaintext credentials to an external payments SaaS. The sidecar is running and healthy. Why is that traffic not encrypted by the mesh?

    3 min answer sidecarmtlsservice meshtrust boundaries
  10. The Six Rs beginner Multiple choice

    A data-centre lease ends in seven months and 900 virtual machines on an on-premises hypervisor cluster have to leave. The portfolio review assigned every one of them "rehost" — rebuild each machine on native cloud instances. The team moves about 25 machines a week. Which disposition fits the constraint?

    3 min answer six-rsrelocaterehostdata-centre-exit
  11. SOLID beginner

    After a refactor replaced a list implementation with an immutable one, a nightly job starts failing with an unsupported-operation error on a line nobody has edited in two years. Every type matches and the compiler was happy. What broke, and what is the design fix?

    2 min answer liskovinterface segregationcontractssilent failure
  12. Stakeholder Analysis beginner

    A migration proposal cuts total three-year cost from £4.2m to £3.1m. The finance director objects to it. What mechanism makes a cheaper design worse from their seat, and what would you change about the proposal?

    3 min answer stakeholderscapex-opexfinancebusiness-case