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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. Redundancy advanced

    A platform runs three redundant instances of a component and calculates its availability as extremely high. In practice, all three fail together during incidents. What is the flaw in the reasoning?

    2 min answer redundancycorrelated-failureindependenceconfiguration
  2. Redundancy advanced

    A platform runs three replicas of every service across three availability zones and still experiences total outages. What kinds of failure does that redundancy not address?

    2 min answer zeptoredundancycorrelated-failureblast-radius
  3. Redundancy intermediate Multiple choice

    Two service instances each run at 60% CPU behind a load balancer. Is that redundant?

    2 min answer redundancycapacitycorrelationfailure-domains
  4. Refactoring & Re-architecting advanced

    A high-change application is constrained by its structure. What distinguishes refactoring from re-architecting here, and how do you choose?

    2 min answer refactoringre-architectureboundariesincremental
  5. Refactoring & Re-architecting advanced

    A team proposes rewriting a critical system from scratch, arguing the existing one is unmaintainable. How do you evaluate this?

    2 min answer modernizationrewriteriskstrangler
  6. Refactoring & Re-architecting intermediate

    Figma's database stack grew roughly 100x between 2020 and 2024. Rather than shard, the team first moved groups of related tables onto their own databases, and only later sharded horizontally. What did the cheaper structural change buy, what did it leave untouched, and when does that bill arrive?

    3 min answer figmapostgresvertical-partitioningsharding
  7. Refactoring & Re-architecting intermediate

    Review this plan. An internal claims application with 220 named users and about 400 claims a day is to be re-architected into eleven services on Kubernetes with a service mesh, Kafka between every service, CQRS with separate read models, and a new front end. The team is five engineers, none of whom has run Kubernetes in production. The stated driver is that a release currently takes three weeks. What would you remove, what would you change, and what would you leave alone?

    3 min answer critiqueover-engineeringrelease cadenceinternal application
  8. Refactoring & Re-architecting advanced

    Six months into a two-year re-architecture you become convinced the target architecture is wrong. Walk me through how you raise it and what you propose.

    3 min answer decision-reversalstakeholderssunk-coststaff-level
  9. Refactoring & Re-architecting advanced

    When would you re-architect rather than replatform, and how would you sequence it?

    2 min answer rearchitectstranglerrewriteincremental
  10. Refactoring intermediate

    A team schedules a large refactoring project and it is repeatedly deprioritised. What approach actually gets refactoring done?

    2 min answer refactoringcontinuous-improvementprioritisationratchet
  11. Refactoring advanced

    An enterprise software vendor of SAP's shape must replace a logging call used at 2,400 sites across 1,100 files owned by 40 teams. The codemod itself takes an afternoon to write. Sequence the change so it lands once and stays landed.

    3 min answer codemodmechanical changebranchinglint
  12. Refactoring advanced

    Figma's database stack grew roughly 100x between 2020 and 2024. Rather than rewriting the application to be shard-aware in one step, the team vertically partitioned first, then introduced logical sharding, where queries still ran against a single database but were routed as if it were already sharded. Why is that intermediate step worth its cost, and what does it find that a cutover cannot?

    3 min answer figmapostgresshardingrefactoring