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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. Microservices advanced

    Your organisation has grown to 2,000 microservices. Teams report that understanding and changing the system is now harder than before decomposition. What do you do?

    2 min answer uberdomaboundariesgovernance
  2. Migration Risk advanced

    A logistics platform is migrating a system that coordinates live vehicle dispatch. What controls reduce migration risk when the operation cannot pause?

    2 min answer portermigration-riskprogressiveshadowing
  3. Migration Risk advanced

    A platform is migrating a live service and must manage risk. Which risks dominate, and which controls actually reduce them?

    2 min answer migration-riskblast-radiusrollbackverification
  4. Migration Risk advanced

    Ant Group moved Alipay's core transaction data off a commercial relational database onto OceanBase, its own distributed database, beginning with a 1% slice in 2014 and reaching full replacement in 2019. What risk control is that ramp actually providing, and where would copying it be a mistake?

    3 min answer alibabaoceanbasealipayincremental-migration
  5. Migration Risk intermediate

    Review this migration plan. Cutover is staged by customer cohort at 2 percent then 10 then 50 then 100. Readiness for each step is "all automated tests green and no open P1 defects". The rehearsal ran against a 5 percent copy of production. The rollback step reads "restore from the pre-cutover snapshot if data integrity is compromised". What would you remove, what would you change, and what would you leave alone?

    3 min answer migration-riskcutoverabort-criteriarehearsal
  6. Migration Risk intermediate Multiple choice

    What is the single most important risk control in a migration, and why?

    2 min answer migration-riskreversibilityverificationblast-radius
  7. Migration Risk intermediate

    You want to replace a twelve-year-old monolith one capability at a time. The organisation releases that monolith once every six weeks on a Thursday evening, behind a change advisory board that meets fortnightly. Tell me what you would do first and why.

    3 min answer etsydeployment cadencestranglerchange advisory
  8. ML Platform intermediate

    A machine-learning platform must ingest telemetry from many concurrent training runs. What are the workload's distinguishing characteristics?

    2 min answer weights-biasesml-platformtelemetryingestion
  9. ML Platform advanced

    A model performs well in evaluation and poorly in production. What are the likely causes?

    2 min answer ml-platformtraining-serving-skewdriftfeatures
  10. ML Platform advanced

    A recommendation platform's ML systems span data pipelines, training, evaluation and online serving. Where should the boundaries be, and what causes the most costly class of bug?

    2 min answer ml-platformfeature-storetraining-serving-skewboundaries
  11. ML Platform advanced

    A training run on thousands of GPUs loses several nodes mid-run. How should checkpointing frequency, elastic training, straggler detection and scheduling minimise wasted compute, and what does each checkpoint cost?

    3 min answer metallamatrainingcheckpointing
  12. ML Platform advanced

    NVIDIA's NCCL implements the same all-reduce with several algorithms - ring, tree, and switch-assisted variants over NVLink and NVSwitch - and chooses between them at runtime. Why does one collective operation need several algorithms, and what does that force a cluster scheduler to know?

    3 min answer nvidiancclcollective-communicationscheduling