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Quiz

126 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 areas126 Architecture Fundamentals2 Distributed Systems26 Data Architecture23 Cloud Architecture19 Networking3 API & Integration Architecture1 Reliability & Resilience4 Observability3 Performance & Capacity Engineering3 Security Architecture16 Cost Architecture & FinOps3 Business Architecture2 Architecture Communication2 Enterprise Architecture1 Legacy Modernization2 AI-Era Architecture3 Software Architecture & Engineering3 Architecture Patterns3 Architecture Decision-Making6 The Architect's Meta-Skills1
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

47 questions.

  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. Architecture Communication intermediate

    In a design review, a respected senior engineer proposes an approach you believe is wrong. The room defers to them. How do you handle it?

    2 min answer communicationdisagreementinfluencereview
  4. Compute Models intermediate

    A fleet of 200 instances averages 15% CPU and 85% memory. Finance wants a 40% cost reduction. What do you do?

    2 min answer rightsizinginstance-familycost
  5. Cost & FinOps intermediate

    Finance wants to cut cloud spend by committing to one-year and three-year reservations. What do you commit to, and what could go wrong?

    2 min answer finopscommitmentsreservationscost
  6. Cost & FinOps intermediate

    The cloud bill has tripled in six months while traffic grew 40%. How do you find out why, and what do you expect to find?

    2 min answer finopscostdiagnosisegress
  7. CQRS intermediate Multiple choice

    A team proposes CQRS for a CRUD admin panel because reads are slow. Is that the right call?

    2 min answer cqrsover-engineeringread-model
  8. Data Architecture intermediate

    A dashboard query that took 200ms now takes 40 seconds. The table has grown to 200 million rows. Walk me through diagnosis and fix, including what you would not do.

    3 min answer indexingquery-performancedatabasesdiagnosis
  9. Data Architecture intermediate

    A product catalogue page does 40,000 reads per second against a database that can serve 5,000. Walk me through the caching design, including what happens at 3 AM when the cache is empty.

    2 min answer cachingperformancestampedeavailability
  10. Data Architecture intermediate Multiple choice

    A service writes to its database and then publishes an event to Kafka. Sometimes consumers see an event for a record that does not exist, and sometimes a record exists with no event. Why, and how do you fix it?

    2 min answer outboxconsistencyevent-drivenintegration
  11. Data Governance intermediate

    A dashboard has been wrong for three weeks. Nobody knows which upstream produced the table it reads. What is the governance failure, and what fixes it?

    2 min answer governancelineageownershipcontracts
  12. Architecture Decision-Making intermediate

    Security wants mandatory hardware keys for every login; the business says it will cost conversions. How do you resolve it architecturally rather than by picking a side?

    2 min answer securityusabilityriskauthentication