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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. Mentoring intermediate Multiple choice

    An engineer you mentor proposes a design that will work but is not the one you would choose: a single queue with a database-backed dedupe table where you would have used the broker's own idempotent producer. They have thought it through. You are reviewing it. What should you do?

    2 min answer mentoringreviewjudgementreversibility
  2. Mentoring intermediate

    How does an architect develop architectural judgement in others rather than just answering their questions?

    2 min answer mentoringjudgementreasoningdelegation
  3. Message Formats intermediate Multiple choice

    A telemetry platform ingests billions of events daily from customer agents. Which message format should the wire protocol use, and what does the choice affect beyond size?

    2 min answer serialisationprotobufschema-evolutioncompression
  4. Message Formats intermediate Multiple choice

    An events pipeline carries 2 billion events a day. Each event is JSON with 25 fields whose names average 14 characters. Roughly how many bytes a day go on field names alone, before compression?

    2 min answer message formatsjsonprotobufcompression
  5. Messaging & Queues intermediate

    A notification service must deliver push notifications for mentions. What delivery guarantee do you offer, and how do you avoid sending duplicates?

    2 min answer notificationsidempotencydeliverydesign
  6. Messaging & Queues intermediate

    A team proposes an event-streaming platform for a background job workflow processing a few hundred thousand jobs a day. What is gained, what is paid for, and when is a database-backed queue the better engineering decision?

    2 min answer queueskafkaoperational-costgitlab
  7. 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
  8. Meta-Skills intermediate

    A strong senior engineer is promoted to architect and struggles. Which skills transfer and which must be learned?

    2 min answer meta-skillstransitioninfluenceambiguity
  9. 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
  10. Judgement Under Uncertainty intermediate Multiple choice

    Zoom's daily meeting participants went from roughly 10 million in December 2019 to roughly 300 million by April 2020. No forecast produced that number. Which planning posture best survives a demand shift of that size?

    2 min answer zoomcapacityuncertaintyelasticity
  11. Metrics intermediate

    A live platform's dashboards show mean latency, which stays flat during an incident where many users experience severe delays. Why do averages hide this, and what should be measured?

    2 min answer metricspercentilesaggregationtail-latency
  12. Metrics intermediate

    A multi-tenant SaaS platform cannot tell which customer caused a performance problem. What must be present in the telemetry, and what does that cost?

    2 min answer freshworksmulti-tenancyattributioncardinality