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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. Legacy Integration Patterns intermediate

    A fourteen-year-old policy system sustains roughly 350 transactions per second at its measured peak and the business peak already consumes about 260 of them. Four new services want to call it directly. Roughly how much of that system can you sell them, and what does the number decide?

    3 min answer legacy integrationcapacityquotasretries
  2. Legacy Integration Patterns intermediate

    New services must interact with a legacy system that cannot handle their load or their pace of change. Which integration patterns apply?

    2 min answer legacy-integrationanti-corruption-layercdcbuffering
  3. Licence & Vendor Costs intermediate Multiple choice

    A design-collaboration SaaS at Canva's scale licenses stock photography and fonts on a per-use royalty. Exports have grown fivefold in 2026 while royalty reporting is still derived from the asset CDN's request logs, and the vendor's audit says the reported numbers no longer match usage. Which change fixes reporting without changing what users can do?

    3 min answer licensingmeteringroyaltiescdn
  4. Licence & Vendor Costs intermediate

    An enterprise's database licensing is tied to processor cores, and a virtualisation change unexpectedly multiplies the licence cost. How should licensing influence architecture?

    2 min answer licensingcostenterprisevirtualisation
  5. Little's Law intermediate

    A platform must size worker pools for a peak of 50,000 requests per second with a 200ms average service time. How does Little's Law inform the answer, and what does it not tell you?

    2 min answer dream11littles-lawconcurrencycapacity
  6. Little's Law intermediate Multiple choice

    An API platform has an average of 400 requests in flight and processes 2,000 requests per second. What is the average latency, and how is Little's Law used for capacity decisions?

    2 min answer littles-lawconcurrencycapacityconnection-pools
  7. LLM Evaluation intermediate

    You want an LLM-as-judge suite to gate every pull request that touches a prompt. It holds 400 cases; each case runs the product (about 3000 input and 400 output tokens) then a judge call (about 3500 input and 200 output). Roughly what does one run cost and how long does it take, and does the answer change the gate design?

    3 min answer llm-evaluationci-gatecostrate-limits
  8. 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
  9. Load Shedding intermediate

    Define the degradation ladder for an e-commerce site under extreme load. What is shed, in what order, and who decides?

    2 min answer retaildegradationprioritisationbusiness
  10. Load Testing intermediate

    A load test passed at 3x expected traffic and production fell over at 1.2x. Name four ways the test could have been unrealistic.

    2 min answer load-testingrealismdatacache
  11. Logging intermediate

    A discussion platform's log volume grows faster than its traffic and now costs more than the compute generating it. What is driving the growth, and what should change?

    2 min answer loggingcostverbosityretention
  12. Logging intermediate

    A platform team stops shipping logs from inside each application process to the log vendor and instead writes JSON to stdout for a node agent to collect. Crash-time logs now survive and the request path no longer touches the network. What has the team given up, and when does that bill arrive?

    2 min answer loggingkuberneteslog-rotationtruncation