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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. Platform Tenancy advanced

    An internal platform hosts workloads from many teams. What isolation model should it use, and how are noisy neighbours handled?

    2 min answer multi-tenancyisolationkubernetesquotas
  2. Platform Tenancy advanced

    An internal platform serves many product teams with very different scale and criticality. How should isolation between them be designed?

    2 min answer razorpayplatform-tenancyisolationquotas
  3. Platform Tenancy advanced

    On 11 December 2024 OpenAI deployed a new telemetry service into its Kubernetes clusters. Its configuration caused every node to perform Kubernetes API operations whose cost scaled with the size of the cluster; API servers saturated and DNS-based service discovery failed across most large clusters, with services unavailable from 15:16 to 19:38 PST. The change had been tested in staging. What structurally failed, what could staging not test, and where would copying their response be a mistake?

    3 min answer openaikubernetescontrol-planemulti-tenancy
  4. Platform Tenancy advanced

    On a shared cluster serving twelve teams, one team's new operator creates a custom resource per user session, reaching about 50,000 objects in a day. Other teams start seeing slow deploys and intermittent API timeouts. What is happening inside the cluster?

    3 min answer kubernetesetcdmulti-tenancynoisy neighbour
  5. Platform Tenancy advanced Multiple choice

    Twelve teams, forty services. One shared Kubernetes cluster or a cluster per team? Justify.

    1 min answer kubernetestenancyisolation
  6. Policy as Code advanced

    A platform team's policy-as-code library has 240 rules. 190 are warn-only because teams objected to blocking. Pipeline output runs to 300 lines and nobody reads it. Two recent incidents were caused by conditions that rules 14 and 87 had been warning about for months. Review this. What would you remove, what would you change, and what would you keep?

    3 min answer policy-as-codegovernancealert-fatigueadmission-control
  7. Policy as Code advanced

    An admission policy requires that every image have a vulnerability scan with no critical findings, and the admission controller calls the scanner's API at admission time to check. The control works. What has the team bought, what are they paying, and when does the bill arrive?

    3 min answer policy-as-codeadmission-controlattestationcoupling
  8. Policy as Code intermediate

    An enterprise wants automated policy enforcement. Where should policies be evaluated, and what makes the approach fail?

    1 min answer policy-as-codeenforcementfeedbackexceptions
  9. Policy as Code advanced

    Review this. An admission policy blocks any image lacking a signed provenance attestation, verified against a key held in the cluster's secret store. 94% of deployments pass on the first attempt, no attestation has been rejected in two quarters, and teams may register self-hosted build runners with the same build system. What would you change, what would you remove, and what would you leave alone?

    3 min answer provenanceadmission-controlslsabuilder-identity
  10. Policy as Code advanced Multiple choice

    Your admission-time policy engine becomes unavailable during a deployment window. Should admission fail open - allow the change - or fail closed - block it?

    3 min answer policy-as-codeadmission-controlavailabilityfail-safe
  11. Polyglot Persistence advanced

    A delivery platform migrated parts of its data estate to CockroachDB and other parts to Aurora. What evidence distinguishes workloads that justify a distributed SQL database from those better served by a single-writer managed Postgres?

    2 min answer doordashcockroachdbauroradistributed-sql
  12. Polyglot Persistence intermediate

    A developer platform accumulates a relational database, an object store, a search index, a cache, a queue and a time-series store. When is this justified polyglot persistence, and when is it accidental sprawl?

    2 min answer polyglot-persistenceoperational-costconsolidationgitlab