Portfolio ↗

Quiz

2827 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 areas2827 Architecture Fundamentals91 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-Making101 The Architect's Meta-Skills92 Delivery & Release Engineering103 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience92 Testing & Quality Architecture102 Data Platform Architecture98 Streaming & Real-Time Data93 Data Governance & Semantics91 Frontend & Experience Architecture101 Edge, Mobile & IoT98 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture99 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk98
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

2827 questions.

  1. Failure Modes advanced

    One instance in a fleet of 20 is failing 30% of its requests. Health checks pass, aggregate error rate is 1.5%, no alerts fire. How do you detect and handle this?

    2 min answer gray-failureobservabilityresilience
  2. Failure Modes advanced

    One instance in a fleet of fifty is returning correct responses very slowly. Health checks pass and it stays in rotation. How do you detect and handle this?

    2 min answer grey-failurehealth-checksdetectionmitigation
  3. Failure Modes advanced

    Roblox's 2021 outage lasted 73 hours after a service-discovery and key-value cluster degraded under contention. Trace the failure chain, and identify the three architectural properties that turned a degradation into a three-day outage.

    2 min answer robloxconsulservice-discoverycascading-failure
  4. Failure Modes advanced

    What happens when a globally distributed real-time communication service loses an entire region - and how should DNS, health checks, traffic steering, failover, connection draining and data consistency interact?

    3 min answer failure-modesregional-failurefailoverdns
  5. Failure Thinking intermediate

    A major platform launch is three months away. How would you run a pre-mortem, and why bother?

    2 min answer riskfacilitationmeta-skills
  6. Failure Thinking advanced

    Between August and early September 2025 three separate infrastructure bugs degraded Claude's output quality - one affected 16% of Sonnet 4 requests in the worst hour of 31 August - while error rates and latency stayed normal. What class of failure is this, and what would you have had to build beforehand to notice it?

    2 min answer anthropicsilent-failuredetectionquality-regression
  7. Failure Thinking advanced

    What does it mean to design by thinking about failure first, and what does that produce that requirement-driven design does not?

    2 min answer credfailure-modesdesignpremortem
  8. Failure Thinking advanced

    What does it mean to think in failure modes as a habit rather than as a checklist item, and which questions consistently produce findings?

    3 min answer failure-modesdesign-reviewresiliencequestions
  9. Failure Thinking advanced

    What questions characterise failure thinking, and which are most often skipped in design reviews?

    2 min answer failure-thinkingreviewdependenciesdegradation
  10. Fault Isolation intermediate

    A design platform's synchronous editing experience and its asynchronous export rendering share a compute cluster. Exports occasionally saturate it and the editor becomes unusable. What would you change?

    2 min answer fault-isolationbulkheadsworkload-separationcanva
  11. Fault Isolation advanced

    A financial platform's card authorisation path must survive dependency failures, deployments, overloaded downstreams and partial network failures. How should isolation, deadlines, breakers, bulkheads, caching, shedding and fallback combine?

    2 min answer brexrampauthorisationisolation
  12. Fault Isolation advanced

    A security vendor pushes a content update to millions of endpoints simultaneously and a malformed file crashes them all at kernel level. What should have been in place, and why is "it was data, not code" the wrong defence?

    3 min answer crowdstrikestaged-rolloutblast-radiuskernel