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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. Model Selection advanced

    A cascade sends every request to a small model and escalates to the frontier model when the small model's self-reported confidence is low. Escalation ran at 18% in week one. After a prompt edit meant to stop the small model hedging, escalation fell to 2% and cost per request fell 40%. Three weeks later a customer audit finds a run of wrong answers. What failed, and which design decision allowed it?

    3 min answer model-selectioncascaderoutingquality-signals
  2. Model Selection intermediate Multiple choice

    A client wants a model that follows their specific document formatting conventions and answers from their knowledge base. What do you recommend?

    2 min answer ragfine-tuningarchitecture
  3. Model Selection intermediate

    A content platform must choose between a large hosted model, a smaller hosted model and a self-hosted open model for a moderation task. What decides it?

    2 min answer sharechatmodel-selectioncostlatency
  4. Model Selection advanced

    A platform must choose which model serves which request class. What should drive the decision, and what changes over time?

    2 min answer model-selectionroutingevaluationcost
  5. Model Selection intermediate

    A recommendation service's model server is down at peak. Should the application fall back to an older model, precomputed candidates, popularity baselines or cached per-user results — and how is the fallback tested?

    2 min answer fallbackdegradationrecommendationsresilience
  6. Model Selection intermediate

    Your music recommender uses collaborative filtering. Newly released tracks are never recommended. Why, and what do you do?

    2 min answer spotifyrecommendationscold-startensemble
  7. Modernisation Business Case intermediate

    A modernisation programme cannot get funded because its benefits are technical. How should the case be made?

    2 min answer gustobusiness-casefundingevidence
  8. Modernisation Business Case intermediate

    An architect must justify continued investment in a modernisation programme after eighteen months with the end state not yet reached. What should the argument be?

    2 min answer business-caseincremental-valueevidencesponsorship
  9. Modernisation Business Case advanced

    Make the case for modernising a system that works reliably and is expensive to change.

    2 min answer business-caseevidenceriskopportunity-cost
  10. Modernisation Business Case advanced

    You need funding for eighteen months of platform work with no customer-visible features. How do you build the case?

    1 min answer business-caseplatformfunding
  11. Modular Monolith intermediate

    A checkout path makes 40 calls across module boundaries to render one page. Roughly what does that path cost in a modular monolith versus the same modules extracted as services in one availability zone, and what does the number tell you about where to draw boundaries?

    3 min answer modular-monolithmicroserviceslatency-budgetcall-amplification
  12. Modular Monolith intermediate

    A product team of fifteen engineers must choose between a modular monolith and services. What should decide it?

    2 min answer loommodular-monolithboundariesteam-size