Portfolio ↗

Quiz

2707 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 areas2707 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture78 Reliability & Resilience88 Observability81 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 Architecture90 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

2707 questions.

  1. Application Architecture intermediate

    You inherit an estate of 300 applications. What do you record about each and what decision does it support?

    2 min answer portfoliolifecycleownershipduplication
  2. Application Decomposition advanced

    A legacy system has no clean boundaries to extract — one shared database, entangled modules, no tests. What is the first move, and in what order should capability be recovered?

    3 min answer legacyseamscharacterisation-testsdecomposition
  3. Application Decomposition advanced

    A platform decomposes a monolith into services. Which boundaries should be extracted first, and which extraction produces a distributed monolith?

    2 min answer decompositionboundariescouplingdistributed-monolith
  4. Application Decomposition advanced

    During a monolith decomposition, the new search service needs data owned by five other services. What do you do?

    2 min answer airbnbdecompositiondata-ownershipcqrs
  5. Application Decomposition advanced

    How would you identify where to split a large application, using evidence rather than opinion?

    2 min answer decompositionchange-correlationseamsdata
  6. Application Portfolio Management intermediate

    A fast-growing company has dozens of internal applications of unknown value. How should the portfolio be assessed, and what decisions should follow?

    2 min answer udaanportfolioassessmenttolerate-invest-migrate
  7. Application Portfolio Management advanced

    A retirement programme will switch off 23 of 140 applications this year. Eleven of them sit on an Oracle Database Enterprise Edition estate licensed by the Processor metric - 4 servers of 32 physical Intel cores each. The business case claims the retirements save 11/140 of the database licence and support cost. Estimate what is actually saved in year one and say which number should drive the retirement order.

    3 min answer application-portfoliolicence-costsoracledecommissioning
  8. Application Portfolio Management intermediate

    An enterprise has an application portfolio of several hundred systems and cannot decide what to retire. What analysis makes the decision tractable?

    2 min answer portfoliorationalisationtieringevidence
  9. Application Portfolio Management advanced

    An estate has 300 applications and the organisation cannot support them all. How do you decide what to retire?

    2 min answer portfolioretirementrationalisationevidence
  10. Application Portfolio Management intermediate

    You inherit 300 applications and are asked which to retire first. Estimate what a single low-traffic internal application costs the organisation per year, and say which part of that number should drive the retirement order.

    2 min answer portfoliorationalisationtotal-cost-of-ownershipestimation
  11. Architectural Drivers advanced Multiple choice

    A large ERP programme was designed around performance and integration. Eighteen months in it fails audit - not because it is slow or badly integrated, but because it cannot demonstrate who changed a financial record and why. Which architectural driver was missed, and why is this structural rather than a missing feature?

    1 min answer driversauditabilityerpsap
  12. Architectural Drivers advanced

    A system meets every SLO but the business is unhappy because feature delivery has slowed to a crawl. What is being measured wrongly, and when is reducing distribution the right scalability investment?

    2 min answer doracoordination-costdeliverydrivers