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Quiz

2707 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 areas2707 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture78 Reliability & Resilience88 Observability81 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture95 Cost Architecture & FinOps92 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication91 Enterprise Architecture91 Legacy Modernization92 AI-Era Architecture96 Software Architecture & Engineering84 Architecture Patterns84 Architecture Decision-Making91 The Architect's Meta-Skills92 Delivery & Release Engineering93 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience92 Testing & Quality Architecture90 Data Platform Architecture98 Streaming & Real-Time Data93 Data Governance & Semantics91 Frontend & Experience Architecture91 Edge, Mobile & IoT88 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture90 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk98
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

2707 questions.

  1. Architecture Patterns advanced

    A design review proposes a system using service discovery, a message broker, CQRS, event sourcing and distributed locks for a workload expected to have a few thousand users. What would you simplify, and how would you justify it?

    2 min answer patternsover-engineeringsimplificationevidence
  2. Architecture Patterns intermediate

    Design a URL shortener handling 100 million new links per month and 10 billion redirects. Where is the real difficulty?

    2 min answer system-designcachingscalingstorage
  3. Architecture Patterns intermediate Multiple choice

    Orders must trigger inventory reservation, a confirmation email, an analytics record and a fraud check. Queue, topic, or both — and what breaks if you choose wrong?

    2 min answer pubsubqueuesevent-drivencompeting-consumers
  4. Architecture Patterns advanced Multiple choice

    Prime Video reported a 90% cost cut by consolidating a serverless distributed service into one process. Does that mean microservices were the wrong choice, and what is the actual decision rule?

    2 min answer case-studymicroservicesserverlesscost
  5. Architecture Principles intermediate

    A commerce platform adopts the principle "every service must survive the failure of any single dependency". A team building an internal analytics dashboard requests an exemption. What does holding the line cost, and what does granting the exemption cost?

    2 min answer principlesexemptionsresilienceshopify
  6. Architecture Principles intermediate

    An organisation's stated principle is "do not build what you can buy". In review it is used to reject an in-house rate limiter for the public API. The vendor option meets every functional need and adds a 40 ms round trip to a request path with a 120 ms p99 budget, and it cannot express the per-tenant burst rules the product sells. The principle is not withdrawn. What did the principle buy the organisation, and what is it now costing?

    3 min answer architecture-principlesbuild-vs-buygovernancelatency-budget
  7. Architecture Principles advanced

    Two teams write to the same set of database tables from two separately deployed services. List the problems this creates and describe how you would evolve out of it.

    3 min answer couplingdata-ownershipprinciplesmigration
  8. Architecture Principles intermediate

    You are asked to produce a technology radar for a 200-engineer organisation with no current standards. How do you build the first one?

    2 min answer radargovernancestandardsconsolidation
  9. Architecture Review Boards advanced

    A review board rejected a team's design in week 3 and required it to use the shared notification service instead. 14 months later that shared service's queue backed up for 4 hours during a marketing send; payment confirmations went with it, because they travelled the same path. The board's decision record names the mandate, the date and the attendees, and nothing else. What failed, and which governance decision made the outage possible?

    3 min answer architecture-review-boardshared-servicesaccountabilityblast-radius
  10. Architecture Review Boards intermediate

    An architecture review board reviews everything and has a six-week queue. What should it stop reviewing, and how should the triggers be defined?

    2 min answer review-boardtriggersqueuesignificance
  11. Architecture Review Boards intermediate

    An architecture review board with a six-week queue is changed overnight: its approval becomes advisory, and teams may proceed without it. What happens over the following six months?

    2 min answer governancereview-boardssecond-order-effectsadvisory
  12. Architecture Review Boards advanced

    You inherit an architecture review board with a six-week queue and a poor reputation with engineering. What do you change first?

    2 min answer governanceinfluenceprocess