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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. Load Testing intermediate

    A load test passed at 3x expected traffic and production fell over at 1.2x. Name four ways the test could have been unrealistic.

    2 min answer load-testingrealismdatacache
  2. Load Testing advanced

    A retail platform's load tests pass comfortably and production fails at the same throughput during a sale. What is different about production?

    2 min answer nykaaload-testingrealismdata-shape
  3. Load Testing advanced

    An annual sale will bring 10× normal traffic in a 72-hour window. What preparation should begin months in advance, and what is prepared but hopefully never used?

    3 min answer flipkartbig-billion-daysload-testingwarm-standby
  4. Load Testing advanced

    Your load tests pass consistently and production still falls over at peak. What is wrong with the tests?

    2 min answer load-testingworkload-modelstresssoak
  5. Log Management advanced

    A globally distributed platform generates logs at every edge location. Should logs be centralised, kept local, or something else? Analyse the trade-off.

    2 min answer log-managementedgeaggregationcost
  6. Log Management advanced

    An observability vendor indexes logs by labels only, not full text, to control cost. Which queries become cheap, which become expensive, and how should teams structure logs and labels to fit?

    2 min answer grafanalokiindexingcardinality
  7. Log Management advanced

    Datadog described Husky in 2022 as its third-generation event store: writers consume from a queue, write schemaless columnar files to object storage, and commit the presence of those files to a transactional metadata store, with ingestion, storage and query scaled independently. What forced that shape rather than a conventional search cluster on local disks, and where would copying it be a mistake?

    2 min answer datadoglog-managementobject-storagecompaction
  8. Log Management advanced

    You own the logging platform for a travel company of Expedia's shape. Legal requires that records evidencing a booking and a payment be retrievable for seven years. Engineering wants 30 days of everything, searchable in seconds. Finance has capped the platform's spend. Walk me through the design, and tell me what you would refuse.

    3 min answer expediaretentioncompliancelog management
  9. Logging intermediate

    A discussion platform's log volume grows faster than its traffic and now costs more than the compute generating it. What is driving the growth, and what should change?

    2 min answer loggingcostverbosityretention
  10. Logging intermediate

    A platform team stops shipping logs from inside each application process to the log vendor and instead writes JSON to stdout for a node agent to collect. Crash-time logs now survive and the request path no longer touches the network. What has the team given up, and when does that bill arrive?

    2 min answer loggingkuberneteslog-rotationtruncation
  11. Logging beginner

    A service emits one INFO log line per request and increments one counter per request. At 3,000 requests per second the two describe exactly the same traffic. Why does keeping the log cost orders of magnitude more than keeping the counter, and when is the log still the right thing to emit?

    3 min answer loggingmetricstelemetry costcardinality
  12. Logging intermediate

    Your logging bill has tripled alongside traffic growth. Name four changes in order of effectiveness.

    2 min answer loggingcostsamplingretention