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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. Partition Keys & Ordering intermediate

    A team must choose partition keys for an event stream. What does the choice determine, and what goes wrong when it is chosen carelessly?

    2 min answer partitioningorderinghot-keyparallelism
  2. Partition Keys & Ordering intermediate Multiple choice

    After scaling consumers from 3 to 12, downstream data shows updates applied out of order. What happened?

    2 min answer orderingpartitioningcorrectness
  3. Partitioning & Sharding intermediate Multiple choice

    A marketplace's product database has become the bottleneck for a read-heavy workload. The team proposes sharding immediately. What lower-complexity options should be exhausted first, and in what order?

    2 min answer meeshoshardingread-heavyoptimisation
  4. Paved Road & Golden Path intermediate

    A team says the golden path cannot support their workload and wants to build their own deployment tooling. How do you respond?

    2 min answer platformstandardsautonomy
  5. Paved Road & Golden Path intermediate

    Review this golden path. A new service starts with a portal form of 34 required fields; an architecture reviewer approves it within two days; the generator then creates a repository with build and deploy wired in. It does not create the database, the DNS record or the on-call rota, which are three tickets taking four to nine days. In the last year 18 of 60 new services went through it. What would you remove, what would you change, and what would you leave alone?

    3 min answer golden pathself-serviceadoptionreview
  6. Paved Road & Golden Path intermediate

    What makes a paved road actually get used, and what is the mistake that undermines it?

    2 min answer paved-roadadoptionspeedvariation
  7. Paved Roads intermediate

    An organisation builds a paved road and half the teams build their own infrastructure anyway. What does the adoption gap indicate?

    2 min answer paved-roadadoptiondeveloper-experienceplatform
  8. Paved Roads intermediate

    How does a paved road achieve governance outcomes without a mandate, and what makes it fail?

    2 min answer paved-roadgovernanceadoptiondefaults
  9. PCI-DSS Scoping intermediate

    An e-commerce site collects card details in its own form and posts them to a payment provider's API. What would you change and why?

    2 min answer stripepciscopesecurity
  10. Performance Budgets intermediate

    A design platform's web application has grown steadily slower with no single change responsible. What mechanism prevents this, and how should it be enforced?

    2 min answer performance-budgetsciregressionfrontend
  11. Performance Budgets intermediate

    A web experience for low-end devices on slow networks keeps regressing despite good intentions. What mechanism prevents this, and what must it measure?

    2 min answer physics-wallahperformance-budgetmobileregression
  12. Performance Budgets intermediate

    What does a latency budget give you that a latency target does not?

    2 min answer latency-budgetallocationregressionci