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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. Tokenisation & Masking intermediate

    Customer phone numbers are replaced with vault-issued tokens at ingest, and the four services allowed to see raw values call the vault to detokenise on demand. The vault becomes slow rather than down - p99 goes from 8 ms to 4 seconds - for three hours during the evening peak. What happens across the estate, and what stops it?

    3 min answer tokenisationvaultavailability-couplingtimeouts
  2. Tokens & JWTs intermediate

    Your JWTs last one hour. An employee is dismissed. Security asks why they still had system access for 45 minutes. Explain and fix.

    2 min answer jwtrevocationsessions
  3. Tool Calling intermediate

    An agent resolves support tickets in an average of 8 tool calls. A downstream inventory tool that used to answer in 80 ms starts taking 6 s but still returns correct results. Nothing errors and no circuit breaker trips. What happens, second by second?

    3 min answer tool-callingagentstimeoutsbackpressure
  4. Trade-off Analysis intermediate

    What distinguishes strong trade-off analysis from weak analysis in practice?

    2 min answer tradeoffscriteriajudgementrecommendation
  5. Trade-off Analysis Methods intermediate

    A team must choose between three designs with different strengths. What analysis method produces a decision rather than a discussion?

    2 min answer meilisearchtradeoffsmethodscenarios
  6. Trade-off Analysis Methods intermediate

    An organisation needs a repeatable method for evaluating architectural trade-offs. What should the method contain, and what makes such methods fail?

    2 min answer tradeoff-analysiscriteriascenariosweighting
  7. Trade-off Analysis Methods intermediate

    How do you decide how much analysis an architectural decision deserves?

    2 min answer decision-makingreversibilityfalse-precisionadr
  8. Trade-off Fundamentals intermediate

    A user-generated storytelling platform is 98% reads with an extremely skewed popularity distribution. The team debates caching, read replicas and denormalisation. How should the trade-off be framed?

    2 min answer tradeoffspratilipiread-heavyskew
  9. Trade-off Fundamentals intermediate

    An architecture review proposes multi-region active-active, event sourcing, CQRS and a service mesh for an internal tool with 500 users. Write the simpler architecture, and state the specific facts that would justify each rejected pattern later.

    2 min answer over-engineeringyagnireversibilitydrivers
  10. Transformation Frameworks intermediate

    A platform adopts a transformation framework and analysts build hundreds of models. What governance is needed to prevent a tangle?

    2 min answer transformationmodellinggovernancetesting
  11. Transformation Frameworks intermediate

    Review this transformation project. 300 models are all views with no materialisations and chains up to 11 deep. Every model has not-null and unique tests on every column - about 2400 tests. CI runs a full build plus the whole test suite on every pull request - 70 minutes. Each developer has a personal schema. What would you remove, what would you change and what would you leave alone?

    3 min answer dbtviewsmaterialisationtesting
  12. Trunk-Based Development intermediate

    A team wants to move from long-lived branches to trunk-based development. What must be in place first?

    2 min answer trunk-basedprerequisitesfeature-flagstesting