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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. Reference Architectures intermediate

    Three teams followed the published reference architecture exactly. All three produced the same defect - unbounded retry behaviour against a shared dependency - and two of them caused incidents. The reference architecture is not being ignored. Diagnose.

    3 min answer reference-architecturedefaultsretriesgovernance
  2. Reference Architectures intermediate

    You published a reference architecture. Teams are not following it. What is likely wrong?

    2 min answer eastandardsadoption
  3. Reference Data intermediate

    A reference data set of branch codes is maintained by an operations team. A branch closes in March and its code is retired. In September the code is assigned to a new branch in another city. Six months later finance asks why one branch's historical performance looks impossible. What happens across the estate?

    2 min answer reference-dataidentifiershistoryjoins
  4. Reference Data intermediate

    Tax rates change annually and must apply from a specific date. How do you manage that across a dozen systems?

    2 min answer reference-dataversioningeffective-datesdistribution
  5. Reference Models intermediate

    A B2B procurement platform adopts an industry reference model for its catalogue and order domain. When does that help, and when does it become a liability?

    1 min answer reference-modelsmoglixprocurementstandards
  6. Reference Models intermediate Multiple choice

    A team adopts a cloud vendor's reference architecture wholesale to run two containers and a database. The result is a hub-and-spoke network with a firewall appliance and three subscription boundaries. What went wrong?

    2 min answer reference-modelsover-engineeringsimplicitymicrosoft
  7. Reference Models intermediate

    A travel platform is building its third availability-and-pricing integration in two years, each with a different internal shape. An architect proposes a reference model. What should it contain to be useful, and what makes reference models fail in practice?

    2 min answer reference-modelsstandardisationbookingintegration
  8. Rehosting intermediate Multiple choice

    A data-centre exit must move about 600 virtual machines in nine months. The first wave moved 40 machines chosen because they were the least busy and three business applications became unusably slow overnight. What should decide which machines travel in the same wave?

    3 min answer rehostdata centre exitmove groupslatency
  9. Rehosting intermediate Multiple choice

    A data-centre lease expires in eleven months and will not be renewed. The team plans to rehost about 300 virtual machines with no application changes. Which benefit is the one rehosting reliably delivers and therefore the one the plan should be justified on?

    2 min answer rehostlift-and-shiftbusiness-casecost
  10. Rehosting intermediate Multiple choice

    A nightly billing batch that ran in 4 hours 10 minutes on a 2016 on-premises server takes 9 hours 20 minutes after a lift-and-shift onto a cloud instance with twice the vCPUs and four times the memory. CPU sits near 12 percent across all cores and the instance is never network-throttled. Where is the time going?

    3 min answer rehostlift-and-shiftbatch-windowsingle-thread
  11. Rehosting intermediate

    An organisation rehosts its estate to cloud infrastructure and finds costs higher and reliability no better. What did rehosting not deliver, and what should follow?

    2 min answer rehostlift-and-shiftcostcloud
  12. Rehosting intermediate

    When is lift-and-shift the right migration strategy, and what must be planned alongside it?

    2 min answer rehostmigrationcostreplatform