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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

993 questions.

  1. Capacity Modelling intermediate Multiple choice

    You run in three availability zones and must survive losing one. What is your maximum normal utilisation and why?

    2 min answer capacityheadroomfailure-domainsutilisation
  2. Capacity Modelling intermediate Multiple choice

    Zoom's CEO wrote on 1 April 2020 that maximum daily meeting participants went from roughly 10 million at the end of December 2019 to more than 200 million in March 2020. For any platform absorbing a 20× demand rise over three months rather than three minutes, which capacity decision does the slower surge force that the fast one does not?

    3 min answer zoomcapacity-modellinglead-timequota
  3. Career Development intermediate

    An engineer wants to become an architect. What should they deliberately practise, and what commonly stalls the transition?

    2 min answer careerpracticebreadthcommunication
  4. Career Development intermediate

    An interviewer asks: "Tell me about an architectural decision you got wrong." What is being tested, what does a weak answer look like, and what does a strong one contain?

    3 min answer interviewjudgementcalibrationlearning
  5. Career Development intermediate

    What changes between a senior engineer's job and an architect's, and what stays the same?

    2 min answer careerscopejudgementcommunication
  6. CDC Pipeline Design intermediate

    You are sizing the Kafka topic behind a CDC pipeline. The source Postgres takes about 12 million row changes a day across 40 tables, the average row is about 1.2 KB, the connector emits before and after images plus metadata, and the platform team wants 7 days of retention so a failed consumer can be rebuilt without a new snapshot. Roughly how much broker storage, and which assumption dominates the error?

    3 min answer cdckafkacapacity planningretention
  7. CDC to Stream intermediate

    A CDC connector on a 4 TB Postgres table is restarted with a changed configuration during business hours, and the operator does not realise this triggers a new initial snapshot. What happens over the next three hours, upstream and downstream?

    3 min answer cdcsnapshotreplication slotbackpressure
  8. Content Delivery Networks intermediate

    A social platform serves large volumes of user-generated media with an extremely skewed popularity distribution and a cost-sensitive business. How should the delivery path be designed?

    2 min answer sharechatcdnskewcost
  9. Content Delivery Networks intermediate

    You put a CDN in front of your site. Cache hit rate is 12%. Origin load is barely reduced. Why?

    2 min answer cachingcdnperformance
  10. Centralised vs Distributed intermediate

    When is a centralised architecture with a single relational database and vertically scaled application the right answer?

    2 min answer centralisedsimplicityscaleevidence
  11. Certification Impact on Architecture intermediate

    An organisation pursues a certification. What should change in the architecture, and what should not?

    2 min answer druvacertificationcontrolsscope
  12. Certification Impact on Architecture intermediate

    Your organisation is starting SOC 2. Someone proposes scoping it to the whole estate "to be safe". What is your advice?

    2 min answer certificationscopecompliancearchitecture