Quiz

2707 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 areas2707 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture78 Reliability & Resilience88 Observability81 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture95 Cost Architecture & FinOps92 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication91 Enterprise Architecture91 Legacy Modernization92 AI-Era Architecture96 Software Architecture & Engineering84 Architecture Patterns84 Architecture Decision-Making91 The Architect's Meta-Skills92 Delivery & Release Engineering93 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience92 Testing & Quality Architecture90 Data Platform Architecture98 Streaming & Real-Time Data93 Data Governance & Semantics91 Frontend & Experience Architecture91 Edge, Mobile & IoT88 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture90 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk98

Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

2707 questions.

Quiz

A multi-tenant platform must guarantee that one customer can never see another's data. Where should that check live, and what makes the guarantee credible?

A workspace product has pages nested arbitrarily deep, with permissions inheritable and overridable at any level, shared with individuals, groups and guests. How should authorization be designed so checks stay fast and correct?

An internal API accepts a customer ID and returns that customer's data. It authenticates the calling service with mTLS. What is the flaw?

A live-streaming platform expects viewer count to increase tenfold within minutes when a major event begins. Its services autoscale on CPU. Predict what happens and what the design should be instead.

A service autoscales on CPU. During incidents it never scales out, even as latency triples. Why, and what would you scale on instead?

A traffic ramp after a quiet period saturates a managed network component that scales automatically but not fast enough. Degradation cascades. Analyse.

A workload has extreme bursts lasting a few minutes, triggered by scheduled real-world events. Should the architecture use autoscaling, pre-provisioned capacity, queues, caching, admission control, serverless, or a combination?

Your capacity plan relies on autoscaling to handle traffic spikes. Why might that fail exactly when needed?

A service depends on four components, each independently 99.9% available, called in sequence on every request. What is the resulting availability, and what does this imply about architecture?

A stakeholder requires 99.99% availability. Your service depends on five internal services each offering 99.9%. What do you say?

A stakeholder wants a video streaming service at 99.99% availability. Walk through whether that is the right target and what it would take.

A marketplace runs across three availability zones in one region. What actually happens when one zone fails, and which common design choices turn a survivable zone failure into an outage?