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Quiz

2777 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 areas2777 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture87 Reliability & Resilience99 Observability92 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture95 Cost Architecture & FinOps92 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication91 Enterprise Architecture100 Legacy Modernization92 AI-Era Architecture96 Software Architecture & Engineering93 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 Architecture99 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk98
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

1029 questions.

  1. Self-Service Provisioning intermediate

    Design the self-service interface for provisioning a database, so that developers do not file tickets and security does not object.

    2 min answer platformguardrailssecurity
  2. Self-Service Provisioning intermediate Multiple choice

    Which platform operations should be self-service, and which should require review?

    1 min answer self-serviceguardrailsreviewboundaries
  3. Self-Service vs Governed intermediate

    A 90-person company has a data catalogue, a business glossary, a stewardship council meeting fortnightly, a dataset certification process and an access-request workflow with two approvers. Twelve people work with data. Review it — what would you remove, what would you change and what would you leave alone?

    3 min answer governanceover-engineeringself-serviceapprovals
  4. Self-Service vs Governed intermediate

    A data team is asked to enable self-service analytics while ensuring numbers are trustworthy. How should the boundary be drawn?

    2 min answer amplitudeself-servicegovernancesemantic-layer
  5. Self-Service vs Governed intermediate

    How do you let analysts work freely without ending up with five conflicting versions of the same number?

    2 min answer self-servicetiersgovernancelabelling
  6. Semantic Layer intermediate

    A company adopts a central semantic layer so that "active customer" has one definition everywhere. Two years later analysts route around it. What did the organisation buy and what did it pay?

    2 min answer semantic layermetricsgovernancebottleneck
  7. Sensitivity Labelling intermediate

    A design platform holds user-generated content, customer brand assets and internal data in one estate. How should sensitivity labelling work so it is actually applied?

    1 min answer classificationlabellingautomationpolicy
  8. Sensitivity Labelling intermediate

    An insurer must classify data sensitivity across a growing estate. What makes classification work rather than becoming a stale register?

    2 min answer digitclassificationautomationenforcement
  9. Separation of Concerns intermediate

    A ride-hailing company moving off its monolith found engineers actively avoiding service calls because they could not see the latency or the failures those calls produced. Lyft's published answer was Envoy, open-sourced in September 2016: a separate process on every host that all service traffic flows through. Which concern was actually separated, what did the separation cost, and when is a shared library the better answer?

    3 min answer lyftenvoysidecarcross-cutting-concern
  10. Sequence Diagrams intermediate

    A checkout sequence diagram has six participants and every arrow is a plain synchronous call with no timeout written on it. In production the fourth participant starts answering in 9 seconds instead of 200 ms and never returns an error. What happens second by second, what stops it, and what should the diagram have carried?

    3 min answer sequence-diagramtimeoutsdeadlinesthread-pool
  11. Sequence Diagrams intermediate

    A logistics platform's engineers cannot explain what happens when a delivery is attempted and fails. What communication artefact would help most?

    2 min answer delhiverysequence-diagramflowsexceptions
  12. Sequence Diagrams intermediate

    A multi-step order flow with compensations is described in prose and nobody agrees on the behaviour. What does a sequence diagram add, and what must it show?

    2 min answer sequence-diagramsagafailure-pathsalibaba