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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

25 questions in Architecture Patterns.

  1. Competing Consumers intermediate

    A rendering platform processes jobs from a queue with a pool of workers. What does the competing-consumers pattern require to be correct, and what limits its scaling?

    2 min answer competing-consumersworkersidempotencyordering
  2. Event-Driven Architecture intermediate

    Before 2017 every consumer of published content at The New York Times integrated with each producing system's own API and bootstrapped its history by calling those APIs. The 2017 publishing pipeline replaced that with one Kafka log. What changed about the cost of adding the eleventh consumer, and about who pays for a backfill?

    3 min answer new york timeskafkaintegration costbackfill
  3. Layered Architecture intermediate

    A layered architecture is described as outdated. When is it still the right choice, and what is its real limitation?

    2 min answer layeredsimplicitycouplingenterprise
  4. Layered Architecture intermediate

    A team applies a strict layered architecture and finds every change touches nine files. Is layering wrong, or is the application wrong?

    2 min answer ramplayeringconcernsboilerplate
  5. Materialized Views intermediate

    A discussion platform precomputes ranked feeds as materialised views. What does this buy, and what are the failure modes?

    2 min answer materialized-viewsprecomputationstalenessrebuild
  6. Outbox intermediate

    A service must update its database and publish an event. Why is doing both directly incorrect, and what does the outbox pattern guarantee?

    2 min answer outboxdual-writeatomicityat-least-once
  7. Pipes and Filters intermediate

    A logistics platform processes tracking events through validation, enrichment, deduplication, state transition and fan-out. What does the pipes-and-filters shape buy, and where does it break down?

    2 min answer delhiverypipelinestagesbackpressure
  8. Pipes and Filters intermediate

    A nightly recommendation pipeline has one stage consuming 80% of the wall-clock time. How do you diagnose it and what are your options?

    3 min answer pipelinesbatchspotifyperformance
  9. Pipes and Filters intermediate

    A team splits a single batch job into seven stages connected by queues, so each stage can scale and be retried independently. Throughput improves. What have they given up, and when does that bill arrive?

    2 min answer pipes and filtersqueueslatencyoperability
  10. Pipes and Filters intermediate

    A video platform's transcoding pipeline is a sequence of independent processing stages. What does the pipes-and-filters structure buy, and what must be added for it to work at scale?

    2 min answer pipes-and-filterspipelinestagesbackpressure
  11. Publish/Subscribe intermediate

    A team must choose between publish-subscribe and a work queue for a new integration. What distinguishes them, and which failure mode does each have?

    2 min answer confluentpubsubqueuefanout
  12. Saga intermediate

    Review this. A grocery-fulfilment platform in the mould of Instacart runs an orchestrated saga over five steps - cart freeze, pricing, promotion, loyalty accrual, order creation - each with a compensating action, driven by an orchestrator with its own saga log. All five services are owned by one team, deployed as one binary, and write to five schemas in one Postgres cluster. What would you remove, and what would you leave alone?

    3 min answer sagacompensationtransactionssimplification