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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. Replication intermediate

    Users report their own profile edits sometimes vanish immediately after saving. Replication lag averages 300 ms. Explain and give three fixes of increasing cost.

    2 min answer replicationlagread-your-writesconsistency
  2. Requirements to Constraints intermediate Multiple choice

    A video conferencing product grows from 10 million to 300 million daily participants in ten weeks. No feature request changed. Which part of the architecture is under threat first, and why?

    2 min answer constraintscapacityscalingzoom
  3. Requirements to Constraints intermediate

    Groww's brokers and exchanges are only reachable during market hours, settlement files arrive at fixed times, and regulators require an immutable audit record. Which of these is a requirement and which is a constraint, and why does the distinction matter?

    1 min answer constraintsgrowwbrokerageregulation
  4. Reranking intermediate

    A retrieval system's first-stage results are mediocre. Is reranking the right investment, and what does it cost?

    2 min answer rerankingretrievallatencycost
  5. Reranking intermediate

    Retrieval returns 100 candidates and a cross-encoder reranks all of them. The service must hold 300 queries per second at a 400 ms p95 budget for the whole retrieval stage. Roughly what does that rerank cost in hardware and time and does it change the design?

    3 min answer rerankingcross-encodercapacity-planninggpu
  6. Research & Evaluation intermediate

    A team's evaluation of a new datastore is a benchmark report: throughput at three concurrency levels, p99 latency, and a cost comparison. They want to commit. Review the evaluation. What is missing and what would you add?

    2 min answer booking.comtechnology-evaluationbenchmarksoperability
  7. Research & Evaluation intermediate

    An architect must evaluate an unfamiliar technology for a significant decision. What research approach produces a reliable judgement?

    2 min answer researchevaluationspikeevidence
  8. Research & Evaluation intermediate Multiple choice

    You are evaluating a database whose only production references are the vendor's own case studies. The benchmark in their documentation is excellent. You have one week. Which single piece of evidence would most change your confidence?

    3 min answer evaluationevidencereference-callprocurement
  9. Reserved & Committed Capacity intermediate

    A compute platform must choose between reserved commitments, on-demand and interruptible capacity. How should the mix be decided?

    2 min answer runpodreservedcommitmentforecast
  10. Reserved & Committed Capacity intermediate

    Finance wants a three-year commitment on cloud spend for the discount. Engineering is nervous. How do you advise?

    2 min answer finopscommitmentcostrisk
  11. REST Design intermediate

    A developer platform's REST API returns collections that can contain millions of items. Which design decisions separate an API that scales from one that does not?

    2 min answer restpaginationapi-designgithub
  12. REST Design intermediate

    Which REST API design decisions are expensive to change once consumers exist?

    1 min answer restpaginationidentifierserrors