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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. Messaging & Queues intermediate

    A notification service must deliver push notifications for mentions. What delivery guarantee do you offer, and how do you avoid sending duplicates?

    2 min answer notificationsidempotencydeliverydesign
  2. Messaging & Queues intermediate

    A team proposes an event-streaming platform for a background job workflow processing a few hundred thousand jobs a day. What is gained, what is paid for, and when is a database-backed queue the better engineering decision?

    2 min answer queueskafkaoperational-costgitlab
  3. Messaging & Queues intermediate

    For each of these, choose a queue or a stream and justify it — order fulfilment tasks, an audit trail, cache invalidation, and rebuilding a search index.

    2 min answer queuesstreamsretentionreplay
  4. Meta-Skills intermediate

    A strong senior engineer is promoted to architect and struggles. Which skills transfer and which must be learned?

    2 min answer meta-skillstransitioninfluenceambiguity
  5. Meta-Skills advanced

    Walk me through an architectural decision in your current system that you would make differently at ten times the scale. What evidence would tell you that the moment has arrived?

    2 min answer interviewscalereversibilityevidence
  6. Meta-Skills intermediate

    You must choose a data store this week. The product team cannot tell you the expected query patterns or the growth rate. What do you do?

    2 min answer uncertaintyreversibilitydecision-making
  7. Judgement Under Uncertainty advanced

    How do you decide when you have enough information to make an architectural decision?

    2 min answer uncertaintyreversibilityspikesoptionality
  8. Judgement Under Uncertainty advanced

    How should an architect make defensible decisions in a domain where the technology changes faster than the decision cycle?

    2 min answer uncertaintyoptionalityevaluationconfiguration
  9. Judgement Under Uncertainty advanced

    Reddit's published account of its 14 March 2023 outage describes 314 minutes of downtime, says it took the team hours to decide that a rollback was the right course of action, and notes the subtle cause was not found until hours after the site had already been restored from a backup. The restore was the fix. Why did deciding to use it cost more than doing it, and which decision taken before the incident would have changed that?

    3 min answer redditincidentdecision-makingrecovery
  10. Judgement Under Uncertainty advanced

    Review this decision record. It chooses a single Postgres primary over sharding for an orders service measured in production at 1200 writes per second, lists three rejected alternatives with reasons, and ends with "Revisit in 12 months". What would you change, what would you leave alone, and what one line makes the decision reviewable?

    3 min answer decision-recordsfalsificationadrreview-trigger
  11. Judgement Under Uncertainty intermediate Multiple choice

    Zoom's daily meeting participants went from roughly 10 million in December 2019 to roughly 300 million by April 2020. No forecast produced that number. Which planning posture best survives a demand shift of that size?

    2 min answer zoomcapacityuncertaintyelasticity
  12. Metrics intermediate

    A live platform's dashboards show mean latency, which stays flat during an incident where many users experience severe delays. Why do averages hide this, and what should be measured?

    2 min answer metricspercentilesaggregationtail-latency