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Quiz

2707 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 areas2707 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 Architecture96 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 Architecture98 Streaming & Real-Time Data93 Data Governance & Semantics91 Frontend & Experience Architecture91 Edge, Mobile & IoT88 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture90 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk98
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

1005 questions.

  1. Estimation intermediate

    An architect is asked how long a migration will take and has genuinely no idea. What is the responsible answer?

    2 min answer growwestimationuncertaintyranges
  2. Estimation intermediate

    An architect must estimate a large piece of work with genuine uncertainty. What makes an estimate useful rather than misleading?

    2 min answer estimationrangesassumptionsuncertainty
  3. Estimation intermediate

    You are asked how long a migration will take. You genuinely do not know within a factor of three. What do you say?

    2 min answer estimationcommunicationuncertainty
  4. Ethics in Architecture intermediate Multiple choice

    A consumer app logs full request and response bodies for 30 days to chase a client bug. The bodies contain home addresses and partial payment identifiers. Which change most reduces foreseeable harm?

    3 min answer data-minimisationloggingprivacyethics
  5. ETL & ELT intermediate

    A grocery platform ingests catalogue and inventory feeds from hundreds of retailers, each with different formats, quality and update frequency. Should transformation happen before loading or after, and where should data quality be enforced?

    2 min answer etleltdata-qualityingestion
  6. ETL & ELT intermediate

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

    2 min answer idempotencypipelinesbackfillcorrectness
  7. 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
  8. Event Streaming intermediate

    A downstream consumer has been failing for four days. Your event log retains three days. What happens?

    2 min answer kafkaretentiondata-lossmonitoring
  9. Event Streaming intermediate Multiple choice

    A platform processes billions of events per day and requires ordering per customer but not globally. How should partition keys and consumer groups deliver that without creating a serialisation bottleneck?

    2 min answer confluentkafkapartitioningordering
  10. Event Streaming intermediate Multiple choice

    You have 14 systems exchanging data through bespoke point-to-point pipelines. Adding a system means building integrations to six others. Propose an alternative.

    2 min answer linkedinkafkaintegrationcoupling
  11. Exception & Waiver Management intermediate

    A platform team introduces time-boxed waivers so that teams can ship against a policy exception with a stated expiry rather than waiting for a fix. Delivery speeds up. What has the organisation given up, and when does that bill arrive?

    3 min answer waiversexceptionspolicydebt
  12. Exception & Waiver Management intermediate

    A standard cannot be met for a legitimate case. What should the exception process look like, and what does the register tell you?

    2 min answer growwexceptionswaiversregister