Portfolio ↗

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. Cloud Governance intermediate

    A DR test fails: the secondary region cannot launch enough instances. What happened, and what standing checks prevent it?

    2 min answer quotasdrgovernance
  2. Cloud Governance intermediate

    A platform's cloud spend has grown faster than traffic for six consecutive quarters, with no single service responsible. What governance changes address this, and why do purely technical optimisations fail to hold?

    2 min answer cloud-governancefinopscost-attributionaccountability
  3. Load Balancing intermediate

    A live-learning platform expects a synchronised audience for a single scheduled class. How should video delivery, interactive features, enrolment and notifications be architected differently from each other?

    2 min answer unacademylive-videocdnfan-out
  4. Load Balancing intermediate Multiple choice

    A mobility platform must route API traffic, long-lived driver location streams and internal service calls. Which load-balancing layer suits each, and what breaks if one choice is applied uniformly?

    2 min answer load-balancinglayer4layer7websockets
  5. Load Balancing intermediate

    At 11:40 autoscaling adds 20 instances to a 40-instance fleet as request rate doubles. By 11:43 p99 has gone from 300 ms to 7 s with a 4% error rate while average CPU across the fleet is 35%. By 11:55 nothing has been changed and p99 is back to 320 ms. What failed and which configuration decision made it possible?

    2 min answer cloud-load-balancingautoscalingslow-starttail-latency
  6. Load Balancing intermediate

    Every deployment produces a small spike of 502s that the team has learned to ignore. Fix it.

    2 min answer drainingdeploymentgraceful-shutdown
  7. Cloud Pricing Models intermediate

    A live-streaming platform at Twitch's scale is sizing the bandwidth bill for a new regional tier. Sustained outbound is 40 Gbps with peaks near 120 Gbps. Estimate the monthly cost on cloud list egress against a committed CDN contract, and say which assumption dominates the error.

    3 min answer twitchegresscdnbandwidth
  8. Cloud Pricing Models intermediate Multiple choice

    A media platform's workload is bursty rendering plus steady serving. Which pricing models fit which parts, and what is the common mistake?

    2 min answer pricingcommitmentsspotserverless
  9. Cloud Storage intermediate

    A design platform stores billions of user assets and rendered outputs, where a small fraction are accessed constantly and most are never accessed again after the first week. Design the storage architecture.

    2 min answer object-storagetieringlifecyclecdn
  10. Cloud Storage intermediate Multiple choice

    A product serves user-uploaded images in twelve renditions across devices. Precompute all renditions on upload or generate on demand and cache?

    2 min answer storagecdnrenditionspinterest
  11. Cloud Storage intermediate

    Choose storage for four workloads: a Postgres data directory, user-uploaded images, a shared build cache, and seven years of audit records.

    2 min answer storageblockobjecttiering
  12. Code Review intermediate

    A 40-engineer platform organisation requires two approvals on every pull request. Median time from ready-for-review to merge is 26 hours. A staff engineer proposes one approval plus mandatory post-merge review for low-risk changes. What is gained, what is paid, and when does the bill arrive?

    2 min answer code reviewlead timechange failure ratecodeowners