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Quiz

179 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 areas179 Architecture Fundamentals5 Distributed Systems26 Data Architecture23 Cloud Architecture19 Networking17 API & Integration Architecture13 Reliability & Resilience9 Observability8 Performance & Capacity Engineering6 Security Architecture16 Cost Architecture & FinOps4 Business Architecture2 Architecture Communication3 Enterprise Architecture2 Legacy Modernization3 AI-Era Architecture3 Software Architecture & Engineering3 Architecture Patterns6 Architecture Decision-Making9 The Architect's Meta-Skills2
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

179 questions.

  1. NAT & Egress advanced

    A service intermittently times out connecting to a managed database. The database is healthy, nothing changed, and failures correlate with traffic volume. Where do you look?

    1 min answer natportsconnection-poolingprivate-endpoints
  2. API Gateways advanced

    Your API gateway configuration has grown to 8,000 lines with request transformations and cross-service orchestration. Changes require a platform team ticket and take two weeks. How do you fix this?

    2 min answer api-gatewaycouplingplatformtimeouts
  3. Network Performance advanced

    A global SaaS product has a 200 ms p95 API budget. Users in Sydney see 900 ms against a single US-East deployment. The application team says the service responds in 40 ms. Who is right and what do you do?

    2 min answer latencyrttglobalcdn
  4. Network Troubleshooting advanced

    After moving a service behind a VPN to an on-premises system, small API calls succeed and large responses hang indefinitely. Walk through the diagnosis.

    2 min answer mtuvpnicmptroubleshooting
  5. Networking intermediate

    A user in Mumbai types your URL and presses enter. Walk me through every hop until the HTML reaches their browser. Where would you look first if the page were slow?

    2 min answer networkingdnstlscdn
  6. Networking intermediate

    Design the network layout for a three-tier application in one cloud region. What are the decisions you cannot easily change later?

    2 min answer vpcsubnetssegmentationcloud
  7. Networking advanced

    In the October 2021 Meta outage, engineers reportedly struggled to physically access equipment because the access-control systems were also down. What class of dependency is that, and how do you find yours?

    2 min answer bgpdnsdependenciesout-of-band
  8. NoSQL Stores intermediate

    A team wants to move a workload from PostgreSQL to a document store because "the schema keeps changing". What do you ask?

    2 min answer nosqlschemamigrationdecision-making
  9. Observability intermediate

    You are designing a new service. What must be in place before it goes live so that whoever is paged at 3 AM can diagnose it without you?

    2 min answer observabilityoncallalertinglogging
  10. Observability advanced

    Your observability bill is now 40% of your compute bill. Leadership wants it cut in half without going blind. What do you cut?

    2 min answer observabilitycostcardinalitysampling
  11. Observability advanced

    p99 latency on checkout tripled overnight. Dashboards look normal, no deployment went out, and every service reports healthy. How do you find it?

    3 min answer debuggingtracinglatencydiagnosis
  12. Pagination & Filtering intermediate

    A list endpoint returning 2 million records times out on deep pages and returns 500 for validation failures. Fix both properly.

    2 min answer paginationcursorserrorshttp-semantics