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. FinOps Practice advanced

    An interviewer says - your platform team has found a change that would cut roughly £400000 a year of cloud spend and would take two engineers a quarter to deliver. Talk me through how you decide, and what you would want to know before you answer.

    3 min answer finopsprioritisationcommitmentsengineering time
  2. FinOps Practice advanced

    Cloud spend has grown 60% in a year while revenue grew 15%. The CFO wants a 30% reduction. How do you respond?

    3 min answer finopscostunit-economicsgovernance
  3. FinOps Practice advanced

    How would you make cost a routine engineering concern without slowing delivery?

    2 min answer finopsculturedesign-reviewanomaly-detection
  4. FinOps Practice intermediate

    What distinguishes a FinOps practice that works from one that produces reports nobody acts on?

    2 min answer finopspracticeownershipculture
  5. Firewalls & Security Groups advanced

    An attacker compromises one container in your cluster. What should your network controls prevent, and what can they not help with?

    2 min answer securitysegmentationzero-trustlateral-movement
  6. Firewalls & Security Groups intermediate

    An auditor asks you to prove the reporting service cannot reach the payments database. What evidence would you produce, and why is a screenshot of the security group not it?

    3 min answer reachabilityauditflow-logssecurity-groups
  7. Firewalls & Security Groups intermediate

    An enterprise platform has accumulated thousands of network security rules over years, and nobody can determine whether a given rule is still needed. What is the diagnosis and what would you change?

    2 min answer network-securitysecurity-groupspolicyleast-privilege
  8. Firewalls & Security Groups intermediate

    Automated traffic is 60% of your requests, distorting analytics and consuming capacity. Where do you handle it and how?

    2 min answer cloudflarebotsedgecapacity
  9. Firewalls & Security Groups advanced

    Security requires default-deny egress across the estate. Engineering says it will cause constant outages. How do you deliver it?

    2 min answer egresszero-trustflow-logssecurity
  10. First-Principles Reasoning beginner

    A product manager asks for a 25 ms round-trip response time for users in London talking to a service in New York, arguing that a faster network provider would deliver it. Roughly what is the physical floor, and what does the answer let you do?

    3 min answer latencyphysicsfirst-principlesestimation
  11. First-Principles Reasoning advanced

    A team says 200 ms is the minimum achievable latency for an operation. How would you check?

    2 min answer first-principleslatencyassumptionsphysics
  12. First-Principles Reasoning intermediate

    A vendor's datastore is documented at one million writes per second. Your cluster does 40000 writes per second and p99 write latency is 900 ms. Nothing is erroring. Work from first principles - where do the claim and your reality diverge?

    2 min answer first-principlesbenchmarkswrite-amplificationdurability