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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

36 questions in Architecture Fundamentals.

  1. Modularity intermediate

    A startup with 20 engineers and steady moderate traffic proposes moving to microservices to prepare for growth. What would you recommend and under what conditions would you change your mind?

    3 min answer modular-monolithmicroservicesteam-sizeshopify
  2. Quality Attributes intermediate Multiple choice

    A product manager asks to tighten the API latency target from p99 300 ms to p99 100 ms. What should the architect do before agreeing?

    2 min answer quality-attributesnfrtradeoffscost
  3. Quality Attributes intermediate

    A project is three sprints from launch and no non-functional requirements were ever written down. What do you do?

    1 min answer nfrrequirementsquality-attributes
  4. Quality Attributes intermediate

    What happens if a global content delivery platform sets a quality-attribute target of "cache hit ratio above 95%" and simultaneously "content updates visible worldwide within 5 seconds"? Explain the conflict and how it is normally resolved.

    2 min answer quality-attributescachingcdnakamai
  5. Reference Models intermediate

    A B2B procurement platform adopts an industry reference model for its catalogue and order domain. When does that help, and when does it become a liability?

    1 min answer reference-modelsmoglixprocurementstandards
  6. Reference Models intermediate Multiple choice

    A team adopts a cloud vendor's reference architecture wholesale to run two containers and a database. The result is a hub-and-spoke network with a firewall appliance and three subscription boundaries. What went wrong?

    2 min answer reference-modelsover-engineeringsimplicitymicrosoft
  7. Reference Models intermediate

    A travel platform is building its third availability-and-pricing integration in two years, each with a different internal shape. An architect proposes a reference model. What should it contain to be useful, and what makes reference models fail in practice?

    2 min answer reference-modelsstandardisationbookingintegration
  8. Requirements to Constraints intermediate Multiple choice

    A video conferencing product grows from 10 million to 300 million daily participants in ten weeks. No feature request changed. Which part of the architecture is under threat first, and why?

    2 min answer constraintscapacityscalingzoom
  9. Requirements to Constraints intermediate

    Groww's brokers and exchanges are only reachable during market hours, settlement files arrive at fixed times, and regulators require an immutable audit record. Which of these is a requirement and which is a constraint, and why does the distinction matter?

    1 min answer constraintsgrowwbrokerageregulation
  10. Separation of Concerns intermediate

    A ride-hailing company moving off its monolith found engineers actively avoiding service calls because they could not see the latency or the failures those calls produced. Lyft's published answer was Envoy, open-sourced in September 2016: a separate process on every host that all service traffic flows through. Which concern was actually separated, what did the separation cost, and when is a shared library the better answer?

    3 min answer lyftenvoysidecarcross-cutting-concern
  11. Trade-off Fundamentals intermediate

    A user-generated storytelling platform is 98% reads with an extremely skewed popularity distribution. The team debates caching, read replicas and denormalisation. How should the trade-off be framed?

    2 min answer tradeoffspratilipiread-heavyskew
  12. Trade-off Fundamentals intermediate

    An architecture review proposes multi-region active-active, event sourcing, CQRS and a service mesh for an internal tool with 500 users. Write the simpler architecture, and state the specific facts that would justify each rejected pattern later.

    2 min answer over-engineeringyagnireversibilitydrivers