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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

993 questions.

  1. Network & Egress Costs intermediate

    Data egress and cross-zone transfer charges are shaping an architecture's cost. What design decisions actually reduce them, and what is commonly done that does not help?

    2 min answer egresscross-zonecdndata-gravity
  2. 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
  3. Encryption intermediate Multiple choice

    A restricted column must be encrypted in the application before it reaches the database, and support staff must still look customers up by that exact value. 30 million rows and a p95 budget of 200 ms for the lookup. Which design?

    2 min answer field-level-encryptionblind-indexdeterministic-encryptionsearchable-encryption
  4. Encryption intermediate Multiple choice

    Your database is encrypted at rest. An attacker obtains valid application credentials. What does the encryption protect against?

    2 min answer encryptionthreat-modelkey-managementat-rest
  5. End-to-End Test Economics intermediate

    A team's end-to-end suite takes ninety minutes and fails intermittently. How many end-to-end tests should there be?

    2 min answer chargebeee2eeconomicscoverage
  6. End-to-End Test Economics intermediate

    End-to-end tests fail intermittently and nobody owns them. QA says the developers broke them; developers say the tests are flaky. How do you resolve this?

    2 min answer testingownershipflakinessorganisation
  7. Presenting to Engineers intermediate

    A platform team's documentation is comprehensive and its users still ask questions it answers. What is wrong with the writing?

    2 min answer dbt-labsdocumentationdeveloper-experiencestructure
  8. Presenting to Engineers intermediate

    An architect's design is technically sound and the engineering team resists implementing it. What is usually the communication failure?

    2 min answer communicationbuy-inrationaleengineers
  9. Presenting to Engineers intermediate

    Six weeks after a design was agreed, three of its four key decisions are implemented differently and nobody raised it. The document has 18 comments with 16 of them from two people, 11 of 14 engineers opened it once, and the decision record was merged with two approvals in under four minutes. What do you conclude, which signal is misleading, and what would have caught this in week one?

    3 min answer design documentsreviewapprovalsdivergence
  10. Environment Parity intermediate

    A change passes every test in staging and fails immediately in production. Staging is a faithful copy of the topology. What are the most likely causes, and what would you change?

    2 min answer environmentsparitytesting
  11. Environment Parity intermediate

    Which dimensions of environment parity actually matter, and which are safe to differ?

    1 min answer parityenvironmentsconfigurationdeployment
  12. Environment Strategy intermediate

    An organisation has development, integration, staging, pre-production and production environments, and bugs still reach production. What should change?

    2 min answer freshworksenvironmentsparitytesting-in-production