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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. Queueing Theory intermediate

    A capacity review shows services running at 85% CPU. Finance suggests raising it to 95% to save money. What is your response?

    2 min answer capacitylatencycost
  2. RAG Architecture intermediate

    A business unit wants an assistant answering questions from 200,000 internal documents. They ask whether to fine-tune a model or use retrieval. How do you decide?

    2 min answer airagfine-tuningarchitecture
  3. Real-Time Serving Layer intermediate Multiple choice

    A product page needs the current computed price for one product id at 40,000 reads per second with p99 under 25 ms. A stream processor already recomputes each product's price every few seconds from competitor and inventory events. Where should the read path go?

    3 min answer serving-layerkey-valuequeryable-stateolap
  4. Real User Monitoring intermediate

    A content platform's synthetic tests pass and users report slowness. What monitoring closes the gap?

    2 min answer pratilipirumfield-datasegmentation
  5. Real-Time Analytical Stores intermediate Multiple choice

    A creator analytics feature must show per-minute view counts for 8 million creators over a 90-day window at p95 under 500 ms while ingesting 300 thousand view events per second. Work out the row counts and decide which storage shape fits.

    3 min answer rollupretentioncolumnarsizing
  6. Real-Time Analytical Stores intermediate Multiple choice

    A team proposes a specialised real-time analytics store for an internal dashboard used by twelve analysts. Assess.

    2 min answer architecturecostdecision
  7. Rebuild vs Re-architect intermediate

    Review this plan. Eighteen months to rebuild the policy engine. Feature parity is required before any traffic moves. The legacy team is frozen to bug fixes only so that no effort is wasted on code that will be thrown away. What would you remove, what would you change, and what would you leave alone?

    3 min answer rewritefeature-parityarchitecture-reviewincremental-migration
  8. Redundancy intermediate Multiple choice

    Two service instances each run at 60% CPU behind a load balancer. Is that redundant?

    2 min answer redundancycapacitycorrelationfailure-domains
  9. Refactoring & Re-architecting intermediate

    Figma's database stack grew roughly 100x between 2020 and 2024. Rather than shard, the team first moved groups of related tables onto their own databases, and only later sharded horizontally. What did the cheaper structural change buy, what did it leave untouched, and when does that bill arrive?

    3 min answer figmapostgresvertical-partitioningsharding
  10. Refactoring intermediate

    A team schedules a large refactoring project and it is repeatedly deprioritised. What approach actually gets refactoring done?

    2 min answer refactoringcontinuous-improvementprioritisationratchet
  11. Reference Architectures intermediate

    An enterprise publishes reference architectures that teams do not follow. What makes a reference architecture get used?

    2 min answer reference-architectureadoptioninstantiationdecisions
  12. Reference Architectures intermediate

    An organisation publishes reference architectures that teams do not follow. What is the failure, and what would work?

    2 min answer chargebeereference-architecturepaved-roadadoption