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Quiz

2627 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 areas2627 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture77 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture78 Reliability & Resilience88 Observability81 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture85 Cost Architecture & FinOps82 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication91 Enterprise Architecture91 Legacy Modernization82 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

36 questions in Architecture Fundamentals.

  1. Architecture Roles intermediate

    You join as the architect for a 60-service estate you have never seen. What do you do in the first month?

    2 min answer meta-skillsonboardingpractice
  2. Architecture Styles intermediate Multiple choice

    A browser-based design tool in Canva's mould lets users export a 40-page document to PDF, a 90-second animation to MP4 or a print-ready file. Export work takes anywhere from 3 seconds to 11 minutes, about 60000 a day, bursting around 09:00 in each region. All three run inside the synchronous web tier today and p99 export requests are killed by the load balancer at 60 seconds. Which architecture style should the export path use?

    3 min answer architecture-stylesasync-processingjob-queuemedia-rendering
  3. Architecture Styles intermediate Multiple choice

    A news organisation runs a normal publishing platform for most of the year and an entirely different traffic profile on election night. Which architecture style should the read path use, and how does that differ from the style appropriate to the newsroom's editing tools?

    2 min answer architecture-stylesread-pathcachingnew-york-times
  4. Cohesion intermediate

    A subscription-billing platform has an "invoice service" that generates invoices, sends dunning emails, computes tax, syncs to accounting systems and renders PDFs. Is that cohesive? How would you decide?

    1 min answer cohesionchargebeebillingboundaries
  5. Cohesion intermediate Multiple choice

    Every meaningful feature in a platform requires changes to at least nine services and three teams. Which architectural property has failed and what is the diagnostic?

    2 min answer cohesionboundariesconways-lawspotify
  6. Conway's Law intermediate

    Two teams own two deployables: a reader-facing API and a mobile backend-for-frontend that calls it. They are merged into one team of nine with one backlog and one standup. What happens to the interface between those two services over the next two quarters, and what would you do about it now?

    3 min answer conways-lawteam-topologiesservice-boundariesfitness-functions
  7. Coupling intermediate Multiple choice

    At Meesho-scale marketplace growth, catalogue, pricing, order and logistics teams all read and write one shared product table, each deploying schema changes independently. Which kind of coupling is this, and why does it get worse rather than plateau?

    2 min answer couplingmeeshomarketplaceshared-database
  8. Fitness Functions intermediate Multiple choice

    A broker's order-placement path has a 200ms p99 budget that quietly degraded over eighteen months without any single change being responsible. What kind of control prevents this, and where must it run?

    1 min answer fitness-functionszerodhalatency-budgetpipeline
  9. Fitness Functions intermediate

    You want to enforce that the domain layer does not depend on infrastructure. How do you make it stick?

    2 min answer governanceautomationevolutionary
  10. Functional vs Non-Functional intermediate

    "Interview. Etsy has millions of sellers listing handmade items and buyers browsing and searching them. Give me the functional requirements in thirty seconds, then tell me which non-functional requirement actually determines the architecture, and why." How should a strong candidate answer?

    1 min answer nfrmarketplacesearchetsy
  11. Functional vs Non-Functional intermediate Multiple choice

    "Place an order" and "an order placed during the market open surge is acknowledged within 200ms at p99" — Zerodha needs both. Which one actually constrains the architecture, and why is that not obvious?

    1 min answer nfrzerodhatradinglatency
  12. Modularity intermediate

    A developer platform composes Postgres, an auth service, storage, realtime subscriptions and an auto-generated API into one product. What makes that modular rather than merely multi-component, and what is the test?

    1 min answer modularitysupabasereplaceabilitycomposition