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Quiz

3114 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 areas3114 Architecture Fundamentals91 Distributed Systems111 Data Architecture100 Cloud Architecture97 Networking96 API & Integration Architecture97 Reliability & Resilience99 Observability102 Performance & Capacity Engineering100 Security Architecture105 Cost Architecture & FinOps102 Business Architecture103 Architecture Communication102 Enterprise Architecture111 Legacy Modernization102 AI-Era Architecture106 Software Architecture & Engineering103 Architecture Patterns94 Architecture Decision-Making112 The Architect's Meta-Skills113 Delivery & Release Engineering103 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience102 Testing & Quality Architecture113 Data Platform Architecture108 Streaming & Real-Time Data103 Data Governance & Semantics101 Frontend & Experience Architecture112 Edge, Mobile & IoT109 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture109 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk108
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

3114 questions.

  1. RAG Architecture advanced

    A retrieval-augmented system serves millions of documents with sub-100 ms latency while embeddings are regenerated nightly. How should index rebuilds, hybrid retrieval, filtering and embedding versions be handled?

    3 min answer ragvector-searchindex-rebuildhybrid-retrieval
  2. RAG Architecture advanced

    A user asks the internal assistant a question and receives content from a document they cannot access. How did this happen and how is it prevented?

    2 min answer ragauthorizationsecurity
  3. RAG Architecture advanced

    An internal AI assistant gives confidently wrong answers. The team wants to upgrade to a better model. What do you check first?

    2 min answer airagretrievalevaluation
  4. Application Rationalisation advanced

    A multi-product SaaS company has accumulated overlapping internal systems - three notification services, four job schedulers, two feature-flag systems. How should rationalisation be approached?

    2 min answer freshworksrationalisationportfolioconsolidation
  5. Application Rationalisation advanced

    A rationalisation programme assessed 400 applications and identified £8m of savings. Two years later nothing has been saved. Why?

    2 min answer eaportfolioexecution
  6. Application Rationalisation advanced

    A retirement programme switches off System D after its 90 users are migrated. The disposition record says "no downstream consumers" - the integration catalogue listed D's outbound interfaces and there were none. Week 2 - a nightly pricing job begins producing output identical to the previous day; every value is plausible and nothing errors. Week 7 - a quarterly regulatory extract comes out 4% off and is queried. Month 5 - the discrepancy is traced to a currency-rounding reference table that a batch job inside D refreshed each night. What failed, and which design decision made it possible?

    4 min answer rationalisationretirementsystem of recordstale data
  7. Application Rationalisation advanced

    An application marked for retirement is switched off after its users are migrated. Nobody cuts the 14 interfaces that fed it or read from it. What happens over the following year?

    3 min answer rationalisationdecommissioningintegrationzombie
  8. Application Rationalisation advanced Multiple choice

    An enterprise consolidates nine departmental systems that all implement the same capability into one platform. Which risk materialises first and does most damage to the programme?

    2 min answer rationalisationconsolidationmigrationrequirements
  9. Application Rationalisation advanced

    An enterprise consolidates nine systems implementing the same capability into one. What are the risks, and what makes such programmes fail?

    2 min answer rationalisationconsolidationmigrationsecond-system
  10. Application Rationalisation advanced

    An enterprise has 900 applications, many overlapping. How do you decide what to keep, consolidate, replace or decommission — and why do rationalisation programmes usually stall?

    3 min answer portfoliorationalisationdecommissioningsix-rs
  11. Application Rationalisation advanced

    Your company acquires a competitor of about a third its size. Both run their own ERP, CRM, identity provider, data warehouse and payments integration. The board wants "one company" within 18 months and synergy numbers were already published. How do you decide what to consolidate and what to leave alone?

    3 min answer mergersrationalisationidentitycoexistence
  12. Real-Time Serving Layer advanced

    A contest platform must update leaderboards for millions of participants as scoring events arrive. What is the architecture, and what must not be attempted?

    2 min answer dream11leaderboardfanoutprecomputation