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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. Rightsizing intermediate

    An automated tool recommends reducing your instances by 60% based on average CPU utilisation. What do you check before accepting?

    2 min answer rightsizingheadroomfailure-domainsutilisation
  2. Risk Appetite intermediate

    A board sets a risk appetite statement: no production personal data in non-production environments, with no exceptions. Engineering accepts it. What has the organisation bought, what is it paying, and when does the cost surface?

    2 min answer risk-appetitetest-datasynthetic-datareproduction
  3. Risk Assessment Methods intermediate

    A risk register holds 34 risks scored on a 5x5 likelihood-by-impact grid. The top six are funded this year and the other 28 are "monitored". Six of the monitored risks describe different systems failing when the corporate identity provider is unavailable. Review the register. What would you change?

    3 min answer risk-registercommon-causecorrelationquantification
  4. Risk Assessment Methods intermediate

    How would you decide which of twenty identified risks to actually address?

    2 min answer riskprioritisationappetiteacceptance
  5. Architecture Roadmaps intermediate

    An architecture roadmap covering three years is invalidated within six months by a change in product direction. How should roadmaps be built under uncertainty?

    2 min answer roadmapuncertaintyoptionssequencing
  6. Rollback & Forward Fix intermediate

    A deployment has caused a production problem. When should the team roll back and when should they fix forward?

    2 min answer zerodharollbackincidentmitigation
  7. Rollback & Forward Fix intermediate

    Production is degraded after a release. The team tries to roll back and discovers a migration has already run. What do you do now, and what do you change afterwards?

    2 min answer rollbackmigrationincidentdelivery
  8. RTO & RPO intermediate

    A financial-operations platform sets one RTO and RPO for the entire business. What goes wrong, and how should they be derived instead?

    2 min answer ramprtorpodr
  9. Saga intermediate

    Review this. A grocery-fulfilment platform in the mould of Instacart runs an orchestrated saga over five steps - cart freeze, pricing, promotion, loyalty accrual, order creation - each with a compensating action, driven by an orchestrator with its own saga log. All five services are owned by one team, deployed as one binary, and write to five schemas in one Postgres cluster. What would you remove, and what would you leave alone?

    3 min answer sagacompensationtransactionssimplification
  10. Sagas & Compensation intermediate

    A service updates its database and then publishes an event. Occasionally downstream systems are missing records. Diagnose and fix.

    2 min answer consistencymessagingoutbox
  11. Schema Registry intermediate

    A platform's event streams have many producers and consumers across teams. Someone deploys a change that removes a field, and three downstream consumers fail overnight. What should have prevented this?

    2 min answer schema-registrycompatibilityevent-streaminggovernance
  12. Schema Registry intermediate Multiple choice

    A team publishes events to a topic read by many independent consumers. They need to add a field with no default value to the event schema. Which registry compatibility mode permits that, and what is the mode really constraining?

    2 min answer schema registryavrocompatibilitydeployment order