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2627 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 areas2627 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture77 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture78 Reliability & Resilience88 Observability81 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture85 Cost Architecture & FinOps82 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication91 Enterprise Architecture91 Legacy Modernization82 AI-Era Architecture86 Software Architecture & Engineering84 Architecture Patterns84 Architecture Decision-Making91 The Architect's Meta-Skills92 Delivery & Release Engineering93 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience92 Testing & Quality Architecture90 Data Platform Architecture88 Streaming & Real-Time Data93 Data Governance & Semantics81 Frontend & Experience Architecture91 Edge, Mobile & IoT88 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture90 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk88
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

36 questions in Architecture Fundamentals.

  1. Architectural Drivers intermediate

    You are designing a payments API. Peak volume is modest - a few thousand requests per second. What is the dominant architectural driver and what does it force into the design?

    2 min answer driversidempotencypaymentsstripe
  2. Architectural Drivers intermediate

    Zepto's product promise is a ten-minute grocery delivery. An architect is handed a backlog of forty requirements. Which one is the architectural driver, and what does that classification actually change?

    2 min answer driverszeptolatencyquick-commerce
  3. Architecture Documentation intermediate

    A database platform team is asked why a decade-old partitioning scheme was chosen. Nobody remembers, the original architects have left, and the only artefact is a diagram with no rationale. What failed here, and what document would have prevented it?

    2 min answer documentationadrrationaleoracle
  4. Architecture Documentation intermediate

    A developer-tools company has a fifty-page architecture document that nobody reads and a set of diagrams that are eight months stale. What should be written instead?

    1 min answer documentationpostmanadrc4
  5. Architecture Documentation intermediate

    You are leaving a project in two days and have two hours to document the system. What do you write and what do you deliberately leave out?

    2 min answer documentationadrhandovergoogle
  6. Architecture Documentation intermediate

    Your team maintains a 90-page architecture document that is always out of date and nobody reads. What should replace it?

    1 min answer documentationcommunicationadr
  7. Architecture Fundamentals intermediate

    A team shows you a design with eight services. Without knowing the domain, what questions tell you whether the boundaries are right?

    2 min answer couplingcohesionboundariesreview
  8. Architecture Fundamentals intermediate

    Instagram served 14 million users with three engineers on Django and Postgres. What does that tell you about how to choose an architecture for a new product?

    2 min answer case-studyinstagramsimplicitypragmatism
  9. Architecture Principles intermediate

    A commerce platform adopts the principle "every service must survive the failure of any single dependency". A team building an internal analytics dashboard requests an exemption. What does holding the line cost, and what does granting the exemption cost?

    2 min answer principlesexemptionsresilienceshopify
  10. Architecture Principles intermediate

    An organisation's stated principle is "do not build what you can buy". In review it is used to reject an in-house rate limiter for the public API. The vendor option meets every functional need and adds a 40 ms round trip to a request path with a 120 ms p99 budget, and it cannot express the per-tenant burst rules the product sells. The principle is not withdrawn. What did the principle buy the organisation, and what is it now costing?

    3 min answer architecture-principlesbuild-vs-buygovernancelatency-budget
  11. Architecture Principles intermediate

    You are asked to produce a technology radar for a 200-engineer organisation with no current standards. How do you build the first one?

    2 min answer radargovernancestandardsconsolidation
  12. Architecture Roles intermediate Multiple choice

    During preparation for an extreme flash-sale event, who should own the decision to disable a non-essential feature under load - the architect, the product owner, the on-call engineer, or an automated policy? Choose and justify.

    2 min answer architecture-rolesdegradationflash-salealibaba