Quiz

2868 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 areas2868 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 Communication102 Enterprise Architecture100 Legacy Modernization92 AI-Era Architecture96 Software Architecture & Engineering93 Architecture Patterns94 Architecture Decision-Making101 The Architect's Meta-Skills102 Delivery & Release Engineering103 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience92 Testing & Quality Architecture102 Data Platform Architecture98 Streaming & Real-Time Data103 Data Governance & Semantics91 Frontend & Experience Architecture101 Edge, Mobile & IoT98 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture99 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk98

Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

2868 questions.

Quiz

Your cluster fails over spuriously under load, but a real leader failure takes 45 seconds to detect. How do you resolve the tension?

Your company runs two data centres and wants automatic database failover between them. What is missing?

A replacement for a 16-year-old claims system passed every acceptance test and went live. Six weeks later the reinsurance return it produced was rejected by finance, and nothing in the test pack was wrong. An interviewer asks how you would have found that gap during the assessment. What do you say?

A team inherits a system nobody fully understands and is asked whether to rewrite it. What should be established before answering?

A twenty-year-old core system supports most of the business. It is on unsupported technology, three people understand it, and the last replacement attempt was abandoned after two years. Design the programme.

Before modernising, a team must assess a legacy system. What should the assessment measure, and what is usually skipped?

On Salesforce's Force.com platform, a customer's custom objects and fields are rows of metadata in shared tables rather than a schema of their own (Weissman and Bobrowski described the design at SIGMOD in 2009). What does that remove from the legacy problem, and what does it not remove?

A core mainframe system with no API supports nightly batch file exchange only. The business needs near-real-time order status. Design the integration.

A modern service must read from a legacy system that offers only nightly batch files and a synchronous interface that cannot handle concurrent load. What integration approach fits?

An insurance platform must integrate with a legacy policy administration system with a rigid data model and batch-only interfaces. How should the boundary be designed?

The system of record updates nightly and cannot be changed. Product teams need to build against it. Design the integration.

A fourteen-year-old policy system sustains roughly 350 transactions per second at its measured peak and the business peak already consumes about 260 of them. Four new services want to call it directly. Roughly how much of that system can you sell them, and what does the number decide?