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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. NoSQL Stores intermediate Multiple choice

    A team proposes replacing PostgreSQL with a document store because "it scales better". Current load is 800 writes per second. What is your response?

    2 min answer nosqlrelationalamazondynamo
  2. 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
  3. OAuth 2.0 & OIDC intermediate

    A team proposes the OAuth password grant for your first-party mobile app because "it is our own app". Respond.

    2 min answer oauthmobileauthentication
  4. Observability intermediate

    A new service goes live next week. What observability must exist on day one?

    2 min answer observabilitylaunchoperations
  5. 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
  6. On-Call intermediate

    A 24-person platform group in one country pages its engineers at night. Leadership offers to fund a second site in another time zone so nobody is woken. What does follow-the-sun buy, what does it cost, and what would you check before agreeing?

    3 min answer on-callfollow the sunhandoversustainability
  7. On-Call intermediate

    A platform's on-call rotation is causing burnout - engineers are paged frequently at night and turnover is rising. What should be measured and changed?

    2 min answer oncallalert-qualitysustainabilitytoil
  8. On-Call intermediate

    A team is paged eleven times a week and morale is poor. What do you do first?

    3 min answer oncallalert-fatiguesustainabilityarchitecture
  9. On-Call intermediate

    An on-call rotation is producing burnout and slow responses. Alert volume is high and most pages are not actionable. What changes, and in what order?

    2 min answer sliceoncallalertingactionability
  10. On-Call intermediate

    You join a team of 12 engineers taking around 40 pages a week, of which perhaps 5 required action. The team is exhausted and two people have resigned. The director asks for a plan. What do you do, and in what order?

    3 min answer on-callalert fatiguetoilsustainability
  11. Open Table Formats intermediate Multiple choice

    A team has 90 TB of Parquet in Hive-style date directories and wants Iceberg tables with no downtime for the 200 dashboards reading them. Which sequence is right?

    3 min answer icebergmigrationhivemetadata
  12. OpenTelemetry intermediate

    A platform with services in five languages and three monitoring vendors considers adopting OpenTelemetry. What does it solve, and what is the realistic migration cost?

    2 min answer opentelemetrystandardisationvendor-lock-inmigration