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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. Service Mesh Operations intermediate

    Lyft built Envoy and open-sourced it in 2016 to move networking concerns out of application services. What problem did that actually solve, and for which organisations does a service mesh fail to pay for itself?

    2 min answer lyftenvoyservice meshpolyglot
  2. Service Templates intermediate

    A platform provides service templates and teams' services diverge from them within months. What should the template strategy be?

    2 min answer templatesdriftupdatesownership
  3. Service Virtualisation intermediate

    A grocery marketplace in the mould of Instacart integrates with 140 retailer systems for inventory lookup and order injection. A platform engineer proposes building a virtual service for each one so the test suite can run without them. Roughly what does that cost per year to keep faithful and how many of the 140 are actually worth virtualising?

    3 min answer instacartservice-virtualisationdrifttest-cost
  4. Service Virtualisation intermediate

    A travel platform of the kind Expedia operates in — dozens of supplier APIs, each rate-limited and slow — runs its test suite against recorded stubs of every supplier. The suite is fast and green. What happens over the following year, and how do you know before a customer does?

    3 min answer service virtualisationstubscontract driftintegration
  5. Service Virtualisation intermediate

    When should external dependencies be virtualised in testing, and what must the virtual service reproduce?

    2 min answer virtualisationstubsthird-partyfailure-modes
  6. Service Virtualisation intermediate

    You virtualised a mainframe dependency for testing. Six months later a production integration fails that all tests passed. What happened?

    2 min answer testingvirtualisationdrift
  7. Showback & Chargeback intermediate

    A platform team wants engineering teams to reduce their infrastructure spend. Does showback or chargeback work better, and what determines the answer?

    2 min answer posthogshowbackchargebackincentives
  8. Showback & Chargeback intermediate

    An enterprise is deciding between showback and chargeback for cloud costs. What does each achieve, and what goes wrong with chargeback?

    2 min answer showbackchargebackincentivesgovernance
  9. Showback & Chargeback intermediate

    Cloud spend is growing faster than revenue and no individual team feels responsible. How should cost allocation be designed to actually change behaviour?

    2 min answer finopsshowbackchargebackallocation
  10. Sidecar & Ambassador intermediate

    A platform is considering a sidecar to provide mTLS, retries and telemetry without changing application code. What does that buy and what does it cost?

    2 min answer chargebeesidecarservice-meshoperations
  11. The Six Rs intermediate

    A company must modernise a portfolio of applications. How should each be assigned a modernisation approach, and what is the most common misassignment?

    2 min answer udaansix-rsportfoliorehost
  12. The Six Rs intermediate

    A travel platform must move a portfolio of applications off ageing infrastructure. How should each application be assigned among rehost, replatform, refactor, rebuild, replace and retire?

    2 min answer six-rsportfoliomigration-strategyexpedia