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Quiz

174 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 areas174 Architecture Fundamentals5 Distributed Systems26 Data Architecture23 Cloud Architecture19 Networking17 API & Integration Architecture13 Reliability & Resilience9 Observability8 Performance & Capacity Engineering6 Security Architecture16 Cost Architecture & FinOps3 Business Architecture2 Architecture Communication2 Enterprise Architecture1 Legacy Modernization2 AI-Era Architecture3 Software Architecture & Engineering3 Architecture Patterns6 Architecture Decision-Making9 The Architect's Meta-Skills1
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

54 questions.

  1. AI-Era Architecture intermediate Multiple choice

    A client wants an assistant that answers questions from 50,000 internal documents which change weekly. RAG or fine-tuning? What actually determines the quality?

    2 min answer ragllmretrievalarchitecture
  2. API Documentation intermediate

    Your platform has 60 internal APIs. Teams repeatedly rebuild capabilities that already exist because they cannot find or understand them. What do you build?

    2 min answer documentationdeveloper-portaldiscoveryspec-first
  3. API & Integration intermediate Multiple choice

    You are designing APIs for a platform with a web app, a mobile app, internal service-to-service traffic and third-party partners. What do you expose, and where?

    2 min answer restgraphqlgrpcapi-design
  4. Architecture Fundamentals intermediate

    A team shows you a design with eight services. Without knowing the domain, what questions tell you whether the boundaries are right?

    2 min answer couplingcohesionboundariesreview
  5. Architecture Fundamentals intermediate

    Instagram served 14 million users with three engineers on Django and Postgres. What does that tell you about how to choose an architecture for a new product?

    2 min answer case-studyinstagramsimplicitypragmatism
  6. Architecture Patterns intermediate

    Design a URL shortener handling 100 million new links per month and 10 billion redirects. Where is the real difficulty?

    2 min answer system-designcachingscalingstorage
  7. Architecture Patterns intermediate Multiple choice

    Orders must trigger inventory reservation, a confirmation email, an analytics record and a fraud check. Queue, topic, or both — and what breaks if you choose wrong?

    2 min answer pubsubqueuesevent-drivencompeting-consumers
  8. Partner & B2B Integration intermediate

    Partner integrations take four months from contract signature to production traffic. Engineering says the work is three days. Where does the time go and how do you cut it?

    2 min answer b2bonboardingdeveloper-experiencesandbox
  9. Business Architecture intermediate

    A startup asks you to architect their product "to handle millions of users". They currently have none. What do you actually build?

    2 min answer time-to-marketpragmatismconstraintsproduct
  10. Circuit Breakers intermediate Multiple choice

    A team proposes circuit breakers on every downstream call. What would you add, and why is the breaker not the most important control?

    2 min answer circuit-breakerbulkheadisolationfallback
  11. Cloud Architecture intermediate

    A team tells you backups run nightly and are retained for 30 days. What is missing from that answer?

    2 min answer backupdisaster-recoveryverificationransomware
  12. Cloud Architecture intermediate Multiple choice

    A team wants to build a new internal API on serverless functions. It will serve steady traffic of about 200 requests per second during business hours. What do you advise?

    2 min answer serverlesscontainerscostdecision-making