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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. Relational Modelling intermediate

    A team proposes storing the customer's address on every order row "so order history is accurate". Is that denormalisation or a modelling error?

    2 min answer normalisationmodellinghistorytemporal
  2. Reliability & Resilience intermediate

    A team is launching a new service and asks what its SLO should be. How do you help them decide, and why is "99.99%" usually the wrong first answer?

    2 min answer slosreerror-budgetreliability
  3. Reliability & Resilience intermediate

    The business asks for "100% uptime" for a new customer portal. Walk me through the conversation that ends in an agreed SLO.

    3 min answer slisloslanegotiation
  4. Timeouts & Deadlines intermediate

    A service becomes unresponsive during an incident in a dependency it barely uses. Investigation finds the client had no read timeout. Explain the full mechanism.

    2 min answer timeoutspoolscascading-failure
  5. TLS & Certificates intermediate

    A partner reports your API fails from their servers with a certificate error. It works in every browser you try and from your laptop. Diagnose and prevent.

    1 min answer tlschainincidentmonitoring
  6. VPC Design intermediate

    You are designing the network for a platform expected to run for a decade, spanning multiple regions, with acquisitions likely. What do you decide on day one and why?

    2 min answer vpccidrtransit-gatewayplanning