Portfolio ↗

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. Multi-Region Rollout intermediate Multiple choice

    Your deployment updates all four regions in parallel to keep versions consistent. Argue for or against.

    2 min answer multi-regiondeploymentblast-radius
  2. NAT & Egress intermediate Multiple choice

    A batch job's networking costs are three times its compute cost. It reads several terabytes from object storage. What is happening?

    2 min answer nategresscostprivate-endpoints
  3. NAT & Egress intermediate

    An observability platform's cloud bill shows an unexpectedly large data-processing charge from NAT gateways. What is happening, and what are the architectural fixes?

    2 min answer nategresscostvpc-endpoints
  4. Negotiation intermediate

    A large partner's integration contract asks for 99.99% availability and a 200 ms p99 on your API, with penalties. Your service currently runs at 99.9% and 400 ms p99. What do you agree to, and what do you trade for it?

    2 min answer slaerror budgetpenaltiespartners
  5. Negotiation intermediate

    An architect must agree an integration contract with an external partner whose interests differ. What negotiating approach produces a durable technical agreement?

    2 min answer negotiationcontractsinterestspartners
  6. Network Performance intermediate

    A managed database platform sees connection exhaustion when customers run serverless functions against it. Why does this happen and what is the fix?

    2 min answer supabaseconnection-poolingserverlessdatabase
  7. Network Performance Tuning intermediate

    What happens when a load balancer closes idle connections after 60 seconds while the client's connection pool keeps them for 5 minutes?

    3 min answer keep-aliveidle-timeoutconnection-resetnat
  8. Network Security intermediate

    An enterprise wants to segment its network so that a compromised application server cannot reach the database directly. What does segmentation actually buy, and what commonly undermines it?

    2 min answer network-securitysegmentationlateral-movementdefence-in-depth
  9. Network Security intermediate

    Review this design. 12 services and 8 engineers in one cloud region. The proposal adds a service mesh with mutual TLS between every pair of services plus per-service microsegmentation policy plus an external policy decision point consulted on every internal call plus envelope encryption with one data key per record. What would you remove?

    3 min answer over-engineeringservice-meshpolicy-decision-pointenvelope-encryption
  10. 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
  11. 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
  12. NoSQL Stores intermediate

    A team needs a store for derived data that is bulk-loaded from offline jobs, updated in real time, and read at very low latency. Why does this workload get its own system rather than reusing the primary online database?

    2 min answer airbnbmusselderived-datakey-value