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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

7 questions in Architecture Fundamentals.

  1. Architecture Fundamentals beginner Multiple choice

    YouTube ingests hundreds of thousands of hours of video a day and serves billions of watch sessions. A new engineer proposes that "the architecture" of YouTube is its choice of programming languages and frameworks. What is wrong with that framing, and what is the architecture actually?

    2 min answer fundamentalsdefinitionyoutubesignificant-decisions
  2. Cohesion beginner

    Review this. An internal library called platform-common holds an HTTP client, a feature-flag reader, a money type, a retry helper and tenant-context propagation. 140 services depend on it. A one-line bugfix to the money type produces version 4.12.0, and until each service upgrades it is running a version missing the fix. The last upgrade wave took eleven weeks. What would you split, and what would you leave alone?

    3 min answer cohesionshared-librariesversioningrelease-cadence
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. Quality Attributes beginner

    A developer-tools team writes "the workspace must be fast and reliable" into a design document. What is wrong with that, and what should it say instead?

    1 min answer quality-attributespostmanscenariostestability
  6. 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
  7. 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