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Quiz

2988 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 areas2988 Architecture Fundamentals91 Distributed Systems111 Data Architecture100 Cloud Architecture97 Networking96 API & Integration Architecture97 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

2988 questions.

  1. Performance & Capacity intermediate

    Your system handles 1,000 requests per second today. Marketing says a campaign will bring 10,000 next month. What breaks first, and how do you find out?

    2 min answer capacitybottleneckload-testingscaling
  2. Performance Test Design advanced

    A load test shows p99 latency of 120 ms at 2,000 requests per second. Production at the same rate shows 900 ms. Why?

    2 min answer performanceload-testingmethodology
  3. Performance Test Design advanced

    A team must load test at 10× normal traffic and a scaled-down environment tells them nothing. How is load testing in production done safely, and what does it find that nothing else does?

    2 min answer flipkartload-testingproductionisolation
  4. Performance Test Design intermediate Multiple choice

    A test must sustain 2000 requests per second against a service whose p50 is 120 ms, with 1 second of think time per virtual user between requests. Roughly how many virtual users does the generator need and what breaks first?

    2 min answer load-testinglittles-lawvirtual-usersconcurrency
  5. Performance Test Design advanced

    Alibaba has published that it rehearses Singles' Day with full-link stress testing — load generated against the production environment, using traffic shading and data isolation. Your platform faces a comparable annual peak. What does testing in production buy that a staging load test cannot, and what has to be built first?

    4 min answer alibabaload testingtesting in productionshadow data
  6. Performance Test Design advanced

    What makes a performance test predictive of production behaviour, and what is the most common design flaw?

    2 min answer performance-testingdistributionrealismbreaking-point
  7. Performance vs Cost advanced

    A streaming platform can halve latency by doubling infrastructure cost. How should this trade-off be evaluated?

    2 min answer performancecostbusiness-impactsegmentation
  8. Performance vs Cost intermediate

    A team can make a workload ten times faster by tripling its infrastructure cost. What determines whether that is worth it?

    2 min answer databrickscostperformancethresholds
  9. Performance vs Cost advanced

    Alibaba reported a peak of 583000 orders per second during Singles' Day 2020, far above its ordinary daily rate. A retailer with a 40x annual peak asks whether it should provision for peak all year, since that is what the big platforms clearly do. What did a platform in that position actually buy, and where does copying it go wrong?

    2 min answer alibabapeak-capacitydegradationrehearsal
  10. Performance vs Cost intermediate

    Finance asks why your services run at 55% utilisation rather than 90%. What is your answer?

    2 min answer utilisationheadroomqueueinglatency
  11. Performance vs Cost intermediate

    Finance offers to fund a three-year committed-use discount covering most of the compute bill in exchange for a locked instance family and quantity, and engineering agrees. What has the architecture given up, and when does that bill arrive?

    3 min answer costcommitmentslock-inreversibility
  12. Physical-World Failure Modes beginner Multiple choice

    A courier fleet of 8000 phones sends one location update every 5 seconds while on shift, 8 hours a day. Each update is about 400 bytes on the wire including headers on a reused connection. Roughly how much cellular data is that per device per month?

    3 min answer estimationtelemetrybatterybatching