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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. Performance Budgets intermediate

    What is a performance budget, why do most attempts at one fail, and how should it be enforced so it actually constrains behaviour?

    2 min answer performance-budgetsregressionciratchet
  2. Performance & Capacity intermediate

    A search engine holds its index entirely in memory to guarantee predictable latency. What does that buy, what does it cost, and when is it the wrong choice?

    2 min answer typesensemeilisearchin-memorypredictability
  3. Performance & Capacity intermediate

    Peak trading day is six weeks away and expected to be four times normal traffic. What do you do in those six weeks?

    3 min answer capacityload-testingpeakreadiness
  4. Performance & Capacity intermediate

    Precompute every user's timeline at write time, or assemble it at read time? Explain why the answer for a social feed is neither.

    2 min answer case-studytwitterfan-outpower-law
  5. Performance & Capacity intermediate

    Your system handles 1,000 requests per second today. Marketing says a campaign will bring 10,000 next month. What breaks first, and how do you find out?

    2 min answer capacitybottleneckload-testingscaling
  6. Performance Test Design intermediate Multiple choice

    A test must sustain 2000 requests per second against a service whose p50 is 120 ms, with 1 second of think time per virtual user between requests. Roughly how many virtual users does the generator need and what breaks first?

    2 min answer load-testinglittles-lawvirtual-usersconcurrency
  7. Performance vs Cost intermediate

    A team can make a workload ten times faster by tripling its infrastructure cost. What determines whether that is worth it?

    2 min answer databrickscostperformancethresholds
  8. Performance vs Cost intermediate

    Finance asks why your services run at 55% utilisation rather than 90%. What is your answer?

    2 min answer utilisationheadroomqueueinglatency
  9. Performance vs Cost intermediate

    Finance offers to fund a three-year committed-use discount covering most of the compute bill in exchange for a locked instance family and quantity, and engineering agrees. What has the architecture given up, and when does that bill arrive?

    3 min answer costcommitmentslock-inreversibility
  10. Pipeline Architecture intermediate

    A monorepo's pipeline takes 55 minutes because every commit builds and tests everything. Developers batch changes to avoid it. How do you fix it?

    2 min answer cimonorepofeedback
  11. Pipeline Architecture intermediate

    A team's pipeline takes 80 minutes from commit to a deployable artifact and engineers have stopped watching it. How do you approach fixing it?

    2 min answer cipipelinefeedbackdelivery
  12. Pipeline Secrets intermediate

    A build pipeline needs credentials to deploy. What is the safe design, and what is the most common leak?

    2 min answer supabasesecretspipelineworkload-identity