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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.

  1. LLM Evaluation advanced

    Your RAG assistant gives confident answers that are subtly wrong. Where do you look first?

    2 min answer ragevaluationdiagnosis
  2. Layer 4 vs Layer 7 advanced

    A chat platform's Layer 7 proxy tier holds millions of WebSocket connections. Every proxy deployment disconnects everyone. What would you change?

    2 min answer load-balancingwebsocketsconnection-drainingdeployments
  3. Layer 4 vs Layer 7 intermediate

    A service has widely varying request costs — most complete in 10 ms, some take 5 s. Under round robin some instances are overwhelmed while others idle. What do you change?

    2 min answer load-balancingalgorithmshealth-checks
  4. Layer 4 vs Layer 7 advanced

    One instance passes its health checks but serves requests ten times slower than its peers. Why is it still receiving traffic and what would you change?

    2 min answer load-balancinghealth-checksoutlier-detectiongrey-failure
  5. Layer 4 vs Layer 7 beginner

    Six backends sit behind one load balancer: two in zone A and four in zone B. The zone A pair runs at 70% CPU while the zone B four sit at 25%. The load balancer's per-zone request counts are even and no target is unhealthy. What is happening?

    2 min answer load-balancingavailability-zonescross-zonecapacity
  6. Load Shedding advanced

    A fantasy-sports platform faces a synchronised traffic spike in the minutes before a major match starts. Workers are saturated. What should be shed, in what order, and what must never be shed?

    2 min answer dream11load-sheddingprioritisationburst
  7. Load Shedding advanced Multiple choice

    An AI inference service receives computationally expensive requests with unpredictable bursts, where a single request can occupy a GPU for many seconds. Which combination of controls should it use, and in what order do they apply?

    2 min answer load-sheddingadmission-controlbatchingopenai
  8. Load Shedding intermediate

    Define the degradation ladder for an e-commerce site under extreme load. What is shed, in what order, and who decides?

    2 min answer retaildegradationprioritisationbusiness
  9. Load Shedding advanced

    One customer's batch job saturates a shared service and degrades everyone. Rate limiting them fixes it, until the next customer does the same. What is the structural answer?

    2 min answer multi-tenancyisolationadmission-controlfairness
  10. Load Shedding advanced

    Your service is at capacity and must reject some traffic. What do you shed, and how do you decide?

    2 min answer overloadprioritisationresilience
  11. Load Shedding advanced

    Your service will exceed capacity by 30% during a known peak. Do you shed load or brown out, and how do you decide what goes first?

    2 min answer sheddingbrownoutdegradationprioritisation
  12. Load Testing advanced

    A commerce platform load tests successfully at five times peak traffic, then fails during the real peak event. What is typically wrong with the load test?

    2 min answer load-testingrealismcache-warmthdata-distribution