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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. Constraint Thinking intermediate

    A stakeholder states a requirement as an adjective. How does constraint thinking convert it into something designable?

    2 min answer constraintsrequirementsnumbersdrift
  2. Constraint Thinking intermediate

    Treat an operator's attention late in an incident as a hard constraint rather than a behaviour to coach. In January 2017 a GitLab engineer working past the end of their shift ran a destructive command against the primary database host instead of the replica. Which controls change that outcome and which are theatre?

    3 min answer gitlabhuman-factorsirreversibilityconstraints
  3. Consumer-Driven Contracts intermediate Multiple choice

    A provider service has 40 consumers and a 15-minute pipeline. Contract tests already exist and the provider still breaks consumers in production. Which change actually fixes it?

    2 min answer contract-testingpactdeployment-gateversioning
  4. Container Image Strategy intermediate Multiple choice

    A critical CVE in a widely-used C library is announced at 09:00. You have 200 services in containers, each built by its own team's pipeline. Which approach patches the fleet fastest?

    3 min answer supply chainbase imagepatchingautomation
  5. Container Image Strategy intermediate

    A platform must define a container image strategy for many teams. What decisions matter, and what is the security constraint?

    2 min answer imagesbase-imagespatchingprovenance
  6. Container Image Strategy intermediate Multiple choice

    At 11:40 a node group scales from 40 to 120 nodes during a traffic spike. The new pods sit in ImagePullBackOff - the public registry is returning 429 for the unauthenticated pulls of base images that three of your images reference directly. Which change removes this failure mode?

    3 min answer container imagesregistryscale-outavailability
  7. Context Diagrams intermediate

    What belongs on a context diagram that most teams leave off?

    2 min answer context-diagramdependenciesfailure-behaviourscope
  8. Continuous Controls Monitoring intermediate Multiple choice

    An annual audit tests a control by sampling 25 changes from the 10,000 made that year. Suppose 5% of changes actually violate the control. Roughly what is the probability that the sample contains at least one violation?

    2 min answer samplingassurancedetectioncontinuous-controls
  9. Continuous Integration Discipline intermediate

    A merge queue tests each change against the current trunk plus the queue ahead of it, taking 20 minutes per run and merging serially. 60 engineers each want to merge twice a day. Estimate whether the queue can keep up, and say what you would change first.

    3 min answer merge-queuethroughputcibatching
  10. Continuous Integration Discipline intermediate

    A team has a CI system but not continuous integration. What is the difference, and what practices constitute the discipline?

    2 min answer continuous-integrationdisciplinetrunkbroken-build
  11. Continuous Integration Discipline intermediate

    Your CI retries a failed test up to three times before reporting a stage red. Trunk has been green for eleven straight weeks. Twice this quarter a bug reached production that an existing test had in fact failed on, and p50 pipeline duration is unchanged. Where do you look, and what is the diagnosis?

    3 min answer flaky-testsretriesquarantinesignal-loss
  12. Continuous Learning intermediate

    An architect must stay current across many technologies without spending all their time reading. What method works?

    2 min answer dbt-labslearningdepthbreadth