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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. Peak Event Readiness advanced

    A retailer expects 20× normal traffic for a two-hour sale launch. Plan the readiness.

    2 min answer peakcapacitydegradationwar-room
  2. Performance & Capacity intermediate

    Peak trading day is six weeks away and expected to be four times normal traffic. What do you do in those six weeks?

    3 min answer capacityload-testingpeakreadiness
  3. Performance & Capacity intermediate

    Precompute every user's timeline at write time, or assemble it at read time? Explain why the answer for a social feed is neither.

    2 min answer case-studytwitterfan-outpower-law
  4. Performance & Capacity intermediate

    Your system handles 1,000 requests per second today. Marketing says a campaign will bring 10,000 next month. What breaks first, and how do you find out?

    2 min answer capacitybottleneckload-testingscaling
  5. Polyglot Persistence advanced

    Four services want four different databases: Postgres, MongoDB, Cassandra and Neo4j. What do you say?

    2 min answer polyglotoperationsdecision-makingstandards
  6. Polyglot Persistence advanced

    Your search index and your database disagree — some products appear in search that were deleted, and some new ones never appear. How do you make this reliable?

    2 min answer consistencyindexingoutboxreconciliation
  7. Privacy Engineering advanced

    Product wants to add "customers who bought this also bought" using purchase history. What does privacy by design require here?

    2 min answer privacypurpose-limitationminimisationgdpr
  8. Private Connectivity intermediate

    A regulated client requires that no traffic between their data centre and your SaaS platform traverses the public internet. Design the connectivity and justify the cost.

    2 min answer private-linkdirect-connectvpnhybrid
  9. Quality Attributes advanced

    You are starting a greenfield platform. How do you establish what the architecture must satisfy before designing anything?

    2 min answer driversquality-attributesconstraintsmethod
  10. Query Optimisation advanced

    A query that ran in 50ms for two years now takes 90 seconds. Nothing was deployed and the data volume grew normally. What happened?

    2 min answer plannerstatisticsplan-flipdiagnosis
  11. Relational Modelling intermediate

    A team proposes storing the customer's address on every order row "so order history is accurate". Is that denormalisation or a modelling error?

    2 min answer normalisationmodellinghistorytemporal
  12. Capacity Planning advanced

    Your platform runs across three availability zones. How would you determine whether it actually survives losing one?

    2 min answer capacityzone-failureheadroomtesting