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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. Layer 4 vs Layer 7 intermediate

    A service has widely varying request costs — most complete in 10 ms, some take 5 s. Under round robin some instances are overwhelmed while others idle. What do you change?

    2 min answer load-balancingalgorithmshealth-checks
  2. Messaging & Queues intermediate

    For each of these, choose a queue or a stream and justify it — order fulfilment tasks, an audit trail, cache invalidation, and rebuilding a search index.

    2 min answer queuesstreamsretentionreplay
  3. Meta-Skills intermediate

    You must choose a data store this week. The product team cannot tell you the expected query patterns or the growth rate. What do you do?

    2 min answer uncertaintyreversibilitydecision-making
  4. Networking intermediate

    A user in Mumbai types your URL and presses enter. Walk me through every hop until the HTML reaches their browser. Where would you look first if the page were slow?

    2 min answer networkingdnstlscdn
  5. Networking intermediate

    Design the network layout for a three-tier application in one cloud region. What are the decisions you cannot easily change later?

    2 min answer vpcsubnetssegmentationcloud
  6. NoSQL Stores intermediate

    A team wants to move a workload from PostgreSQL to a document store because "the schema keeps changing". What do you ask?

    2 min answer nosqlschemamigrationdecision-making
  7. Observability intermediate

    You are designing a new service. What must be in place before it goes live so that whoever is paged at 3 AM can diagnose it without you?

    2 min answer observabilityoncallalertinglogging
  8. Pagination & Filtering intermediate

    A list endpoint returning 2 million records times out on deep pages and returns 500 for validation failures. Fix both properly.

    2 min answer paginationcursorserrorshttp-semantics
  9. Performance & Capacity intermediate

    Peak trading day is six weeks away and expected to be four times normal traffic. What do you do in those six weeks?

    3 min answer capacityload-testingpeakreadiness
  10. Performance & Capacity intermediate

    Precompute every user's timeline at write time, or assemble it at read time? Explain why the answer for a social feed is neither.

    2 min answer case-studytwitterfan-outpower-law
  11. Performance & Capacity intermediate

    Your system handles 1,000 requests per second today. Marketing says a campaign will bring 10,000 next month. What breaks first, and how do you find out?

    2 min answer capacitybottleneckload-testingscaling
  12. Private Connectivity intermediate

    A regulated client requires that no traffic between their data centre and your SaaS platform traverses the public internet. Design the connectivity and justify the cost.

    2 min answer private-linkdirect-connectvpnhybrid