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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. Publish/Subscribe advanced Multiple choice

    A social feed becomes too expensive to generate at read time. Should the system fan out on write, fan out on read, or use a hybrid - and what decides it?

    2 min answer fanoutfeedscelebrity-problemmeta
  2. Publish/Subscribe intermediate

    A team must choose between publish-subscribe and a work queue for a new integration. What distinguishes them, and which failure mode does each have?

    2 min answer confluentpubsubqueuefanout
  3. Publish/Subscribe advanced

    An interviewer says - design the delivery path for a live cricket scorecard to a peak concurrent audience of the size Hotstar reported for the 2023 World Cup final, around 59 million. Walk me through the clarifying questions that change the design, then your first architecture.

    3 min answer fan-outlive eventspubsubcdn
  4. Publish/Subscribe advanced

    In a team chat product, a message posted to a channel with 8,000 members must reach everyone connected. Design the delivery path.

    2 min answer slackmessagingwebsocketsfanout
  5. Push & Background Work intermediate

    A courier app relies on a data-only push to trigger a background sync. The push provider's dashboard reports 99.3% delivered. Product reports that about 6% of couriers see stale job lists for hours, and support notices these users are disproportionately on low battery or older devices. Where do you look, in what order, and what is the misleading signal?

    3 min answer pushbackground-workdozebattery
  6. Push & Background Work intermediate

    A mobile app syncs data in the background every 15 minutes. Users report data is frequently out of date. Explain.

    2 min answer mobileos-constraintssync
  7. Push & Background Work intermediate

    A mobile application relies on push notifications and background processing for time-sensitive updates. What is unreliable, and what must the design assume?

    1 min answer zeptopushbackgroundreliability
  8. Push & Background Work advanced

    Design push and background work for a chat application delivering to hundreds of millions of devices.

    2 min answer pushnotificationsfanoutbattery
  9. Push & Background Work advanced

    JioStar reported a peak of 55.2 million concurrent viewers on JioHotstar for the 2025 IPL final. Take a platform of that shape. At the last ball, product wants a "match won" push sent to 120 million installs carrying a deep link into the highlights screen. Video is on a CDN and the API tier is sized for 1.5x the match-time peak. What happens in the first 90 seconds after the send begins and what stops it?

    4 min answer hotstarpush-notificationsthundering-herdfan-out
  10. Quality Attributes beginner

    A developer-tools team writes "the workspace must be fast and reliable" into a design document. What is wrong with that, and what should it say instead?

    1 min answer quality-attributespostmanscenariostestability
  11. Quality Attributes intermediate Multiple choice

    A product manager asks to tighten the API latency target from p99 300 ms to p99 100 ms. What should the architect do before agreeing?

    2 min answer quality-attributesnfrtradeoffscost
  12. Quality Attributes intermediate

    A project is three sprints from launch and no non-functional requirements were ever written down. What do you do?

    1 min answer nfrrequirementsquality-attributes