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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. Private Connectivity intermediate

    Review this. Each of 46 partner organisations gets a site-to-site VPN into the shared-services network of a logistics platform with static routes per partner and a jump host that partner support staff log into. The per-partner firewall rule set has grown to about 1100 rules and two partners' address ranges overlap and are translated. What would you remove, what would you change, and what would you leave alone?

    3 min answer private connectivityvpnpartner integrationblast radius
  2. Private Connectivity advanced Multiple choice

    You need to expose an internal service to a partner organisation. VPC peering or a private endpoint service? Justify.

    2 min answer networkingsecurityintegration
  3. Product Thinking beginner

    A grocery-delivery product in the mould of Instacart wants to replace "we will message you if an item is out of stock" with "we substitute automatically and you are never charged more". The product manager calls it a copy change. What has the business bought and what has it just agreed to pay for?

    3 min answer product thinkingpromisessubstitutionspricing
  4. Product Thinking intermediate

    A workspace product's engineers propose an architecture optimised for flexibility, letting users model anything. What product-thinking questions should shape the decision?

    2 min answer product-thinkingflexibilityconstraintsusers
  5. Product Thinking beginner

    An internal tool's users are required to use it. Which product signals still mean something, and which are worthless?

    2 min answer internal productsmeasurementadoptioncaptive users
  6. Product Thinking intermediate Multiple choice

    How would you know whether an internal platform is succeeding?

    2 min answer platformadoptionproduct-thinkingoutcomes
  7. Profiling advanced

    A data platform has good tracing and still cannot explain why a specific job is slow. What does tracing not tell you, and what does?

    2 min answer databricksprofilingtracingcpu
  8. Profiling advanced Multiple choice

    A developer-tools company needs to find a performance regression that only appears under real production workloads. What are the options for profiling in production, and what are their costs?

    2 min answer profilingcontinuous-profilingsamplingoverhead
  9. Profiling advanced

    A service is slow and CPU utilisation is 4%. What do you profile and what do you expect to find?

    2 min answer profilingwall-clockblockingio
  10. Profiling advanced

    Discord's 2020 post on rewriting its Read States service from Go to Rust described latency spikes on a roughly two-minute cadence, matching Go's forced garbage-collection interval, in a service that allocated very little. An engineer brings you a similar graph today and asks you to fund always-on profiling across 12000 containers. Walk me through what you would fund and what you would refuse.

    3 min answer discordprofilinggarbage-collectiontail-latency
  11. Profiling & Optimisation intermediate Multiple choice

    A colleague spent a week optimising a function and the endpoint is 2% faster. What went wrong in the approach?

    2 min answer optimisationamdahlprofilingmethod
  12. Profiling & Optimisation intermediate Multiple choice

    A service's p99 is 300 ms and an hour-long sampling CPU profile shows no single function above 4% of samples. The flame graph is wide and shallow everywhere. What does that tell you to do next?

    3 min answer profilingflame-graphoff-cpuamdahl