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Quiz

174 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 areas174 Architecture Fundamentals5 Distributed Systems26 Data Architecture23 Cloud Architecture19 Networking17 API & Integration Architecture13 Reliability & Resilience9 Observability8 Performance & Capacity Engineering6 Security Architecture16 Cost Architecture & FinOps3 Business Architecture2 Architecture Communication2 Enterprise Architecture1 Legacy Modernization2 AI-Era Architecture3 Software Architecture & Engineering3 Architecture Patterns6 Architecture Decision-Making9 The Architect's Meta-Skills1
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

54 questions.

  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. Architecture Decision-Making intermediate

    The team can ship in six weeks with an approach that will need rework, or five months with one that will not. How do you decide, and what do you do either way?

    2 min answer technical-debtdeliverytrade-offssequencing
  4. Architecture Decision-Making intermediate Multiple choice

    When should a service call another synchronously, and when should it publish an event instead? Give me the deciding test, not a preference.

    2 min answer syncasynccouplingavailability
  5. Architecture Decision-Making intermediate

    You are reviewing a design for an internal tool with 200 users. It proposes Kubernetes, microservices, Kafka, a service mesh and CQRS. How do you handle the review?

    2 min answer over-engineeringreviewpragmatismgovernance
  6. Distributed Systems intermediate

    An order service must notify inventory, billing, shipping and analytics when an order is placed. Synchronous calls or events? Justify your choice per consumer.

    2 min answer event-drivencouplingavailabilityintegration
  7. Distributed Systems intermediate

    Design an order submission API that is safe when the client cannot tell whether its request succeeded. What exactly do you store, and when?

    2 min answer idempotencyapi-designretries
  8. Distributed Systems intermediate Multiple choice

    You move a user profile service to eventual consistency and support tickets start arriving: users update their name and the old one is still shown. Fix it without abandoning the architecture.

    2 min answer consistencyreplicationuxread-your-writes
  9. Encryption intermediate Multiple choice

    A regulator asks whether customer data is encrypted. The team says yes, disks are encrypted. Is that a sufficient answer?

    2 min answer encryptionthreat-modelcompliance
  10. ETL & ELT intermediate

    A nightly pipeline failed halfway and the retry produced duplicate rows. Walk me through fixing this properly.

    2 min answer idempotencypipelinesbackfillcorrectness
  11. Indexing intermediate

    A table has 14 indexes and writes have become slow. How do you decide which to remove?

    2 min answer indexingwrite-performancereview
  12. Infrastructure as Code intermediate

    Half your production changes are made through the console during incidents. The IaC repository no longer matches reality. What do you do?

    2 min answer iacdriftgovernancebreak-glass