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.

Quiz

You must start designing and the requirements are genuinely unclear. What do you do?

A senior engineer strongly opposes your architectural decision. You have decided anyway. How do you handle it?

A senior stakeholder insists on an approach you believe is wrong. How should this be handled so the organisation reaches a good outcome regardless of who is right?

On 1 August 2012 Knight Capital's trading system sent millions of erroneous orders and lost about $440M in 45 minutes. Automated warnings had been emailed before the market opened and were not treated as critical. What is the communication failure here, and what mechanism fixes it?

Two senior engineers disagree strongly about an architectural approach, and the debate has stalled for weeks. How should an architect resolve it?

Two senior engineers disagree strongly about an architectural direction and the team is stalled. How should an architect resolve it?

A liveness probe checks the database. The database slows down. Describe what happens.

A platform's gateway processes pass their health checks while holding connections they can no longer serve. What is wrong with the health check, and what should it assert?

A platform's health check returns 200 while the service cannot serve real traffic. What should a health check actually verify, and what should it deliberately not?

Every service in a fleet exposes `/health`, and the check verifies the service can reach its database, its cache and two downstream APIs, returning 503 if any is unreachable. The shared cache has a 90-second degradation. What happens to the fleet during those 90 seconds?

A clinical system holds patient records used for care, research and operational analytics. How should access be architected?

An emergency department needs any clinician to reach any patient's record within seconds, while the privacy office requires minimum-necessary access. Which control set satisfies both?