Quiz

2948 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 areas2948 Architecture Fundamentals91 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking96 API & Integration Architecture87 Reliability & Resilience99 Observability92 Performance & Capacity Engineering100 Security Architecture105 Cost Architecture & FinOps102 Business Architecture103 Architecture Communication102 Enterprise Architecture100 Legacy Modernization102 AI-Era Architecture106 Software Architecture & Engineering93 Architecture Patterns94 Architecture Decision-Making101 The Architect's Meta-Skills102 Delivery & Release Engineering103 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience102 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

2948 questions.

Quiz

Which non-functional properties can be tested pre-release, and which can only be verified in production?

A chat platform stores billions of messages in a wide-column database and hits severe tail-latency problems on hot partitions during large-community activity. Analyse why the storage choice is right but the partitioning is wrong, and what the fix looks like.

A professional network computes "people you may know" from the connection graph. Some accounts have hundreds of thousands of connections. What breaks?

A team needs a store for derived data that is bulk-loaded from offline jobs, updated in real time, and read at very low latency. Why does this workload get its own system rather than reusing the primary online database?

A team proposes replacing PostgreSQL with a document store because "it scales better". Current load is 800 writes per second. What is your response?

A team wants to move a workload from PostgreSQL to a document store because "the schema keeps changing". What do you ask?

A developer platform issues OAuth tokens to third-party applications. What scope design decisions determine whether the platform can be operated safely long term?

A developer platform ships a CLI that must act as the signed-in user on machines that may have no browser at all - SSH sessions on servers and containers in continuous integration. Which OAuth flow should the CLI use?

A mobile client sends its OAuth access token as `?access_token=...` because an intermediate proxy strips the Authorization header. Six weeks later the live token values appear in a CDN edge log that 60 engineers can query and in a partner's referrer report. Which change actually closes this?

A single-page app has used the OAuth implicit flow since 2017 and keeps the access token in localStorage. Security wants authorization code with PKCE behind a backend-for-frontend holding a cookie session. 180000 daily users and 40 third-party embeds must not be logged out. Sequence the migration.

A team proposes the OAuth password grant for your first-party mobile app because "it is our own app". Respond.

A commerce platform can tell that its peak-day checkout success rate has dropped, but cannot tell which of forty services is responsible. What is missing, and in what order should it be added?