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Quiz

2741 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 areas2741 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture78 Reliability & Resilience99 Observability92 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 Architecture102 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

1018 questions.

  1. File Formats & Compaction intermediate

    A platform's analytical queries slow steadily over months with no change in data volume per day. What is happening?

    2 min answer small-filescompactionformatsmetadata
  2. File Formats & Compaction intermediate

    A table written by a streaming job has become unusably slow. It holds 400 GB across 8 million files. Diagnose and fix.

    2 min answer performancecompactionstreaming
  3. FinOps Practice intermediate

    What distinguishes a FinOps practice that works from one that produces reports nobody acts on?

    2 min answer finopspracticeownershipculture
  4. Firewalls & Security Groups intermediate

    An auditor asks you to prove the reporting service cannot reach the payments database. What evidence would you produce, and why is a screenshot of the security group not it?

    3 min answer reachabilityauditflow-logssecurity-groups
  5. Firewalls & Security Groups intermediate

    An enterprise platform has accumulated thousands of network security rules over years, and nobody can determine whether a given rule is still needed. What is the diagnosis and what would you change?

    2 min answer network-securitysecurity-groupspolicyleast-privilege
  6. Firewalls & Security Groups intermediate

    Automated traffic is 60% of your requests, distorting analytics and consuming capacity. Where do you handle it and how?

    2 min answer cloudflarebotsedgecapacity
  7. First-Principles Reasoning intermediate

    A vendor's datastore is documented at one million writes per second. Your cluster does 40000 writes per second and p99 write latency is 900 ms. Nothing is erroring. Work from first principles - where do the claim and your reality diverge?

    2 min answer first-principlesbenchmarkswrite-amplificationdurability
  8. First-Principles Reasoning intermediate

    An architect faces a problem that resembles a known pattern but does not quite fit. How should first-principles reasoning and pattern recognition be combined?

    2 min answer zeptofirst-principlespatternsjudgement
  9. Fitness Functions intermediate Multiple choice

    A broker's order-placement path has a 200ms p99 budget that quietly degraded over eighteen months without any single change being responsible. What kind of control prevents this, and where must it run?

    1 min answer fitness-functionszerodhalatency-budgetpipeline
  10. Fitness Functions intermediate

    You want to enforce that the domain layer does not depend on infrastructure. How do you make it stick?

    2 min answer governanceautomationevolutionary
  11. Flaky Test Management intermediate

    A CI pipeline runs 2,400 tests in 18 minutes and fails about one run in four for reasons unrelated to the change. To stop the interruptions, the team enables automatic retry: any failing test is re-run twice, and the build is green if it passes on any attempt. What happens over the following six months?

    3 min answer flaky-testsciretriessignal-loss
  12. Flaky Test Management intermediate

    A suite has persistent flaky tests. Why is tolerating them worse than deleting them, and what policy works?

    2 min answer flakinesstrustquarantinepolicy