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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. Postmortems advanced

    An organisation writes thorough postmortems and keeps experiencing the same class of failure. What is missing?

    2 min answer growwpostmortemaction-itemssystemic
  2. Postmortems intermediate

    Reddit published a postmortem for its 14 March 2023 outage: a Kubernetes upgrade from 1.23 to 1.24 on its oldest and largest cluster renamed a node label, the CNI's route reflectors selected nodes by the old label and found none, pod networking collapsed, and the site was down for 314 minutes before a restore from backup. Review the *postmortem* as a document. What makes it useful, and what would you push back on in any version of it?

    3 min answer redditpostmortemkubernetesincident review
  3. Pragmatism beginner

    A platform brief lists eleven non-functional requirements and marks every one of them "must" - 99.99% availability, p99 under 150 ms, zero data loss, seven-year audit retention, and seven more. What does that document actually constrain, and what is the single edit that makes it constrain anything?

    3 min answer requirementsnon-functionalprioritisationbeginner
  4. Pragmatism intermediate

    An architect must choose between the correct design and the one that ships in time. How should pragmatism be exercised without accumulating unmanageable debt?

    2 min answer linearpragmatismdebtreversibility
  5. Pragmatism advanced

    Where is the boundary between pragmatism and negligence in architectural decisions?

    2 min answer pragmatismshortcutsreversibilitydocumentation
  6. Pragmatism intermediate

    You inherit a well-designed plan for a new order-management platform: eight months, event-sourced, three services, a migration path off the legacy system. The business now needs working functionality in ten weeks for a contractual commitment. How do you sequence this so the ten-week work is not thrown away?

    3 min answer sequencingpragmatismlegacyincremental-delivery
  7. Pragmatism intermediate

    You review a design for an internal tool with 200 users: microservices, Kubernetes, event sourcing, CQRS, multi-region. How do you respond?

    2 min answer pragmatismreviewcomplexity
  8. Presentation Skills intermediate

    An architect must present a genuinely complex distributed training architecture to a mixed audience in twenty minutes. What structure works?

    2 min answer presentationstructurecomplexityaudience
  9. Presentation Skills beginner Multiple choice

    Four minutes into a twenty-minute architecture slot a stakeholder asks a question that belongs on slide 14 and the discussion runs for eight minutes. You now have eight minutes and fourteen slides. What do you do?

    3 min answer presentationtime managementdecisionaudience
  10. Presentation Skills intermediate

    Review this deck for a 25-minute architecture review: slides 1 to 6 cover the landing zone and network layout, 7 to 18 walk through each microservice, 19 to 26 show the data model, 27 to 31 give the test strategy, and 32 to 34 ask for four engineers for two quarters. The approval has been deferred twice. What would you cut, what would you change, and what would you leave alone?

    3 min answer presentationreviewdeck-structuredecision-forcing
  11. Presentation Skills advanced

    You have ten minutes with an executive team to get approval for an architectural investment. How do you structure it?

    2 min answer presentationexecutivesstructuredecision
  12. Presentation Skills beginner

    You have to present the same architecture to the board on Tuesday and to the engineering teams on Wednesday. How do the two differ?

    1 min answer communicationdiagramsaudience