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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. Records Retention & Legal Hold advanced

    On 27 September 2022 the SEC and CFTC announced settlements with 15 broker-dealers and one investment adviser totalling over $1.1bn, with individual SEC penalties ranging from $10M to $125M, for failing to preserve business communications conducted on personal messaging apps. What was the architectural failure, and what does it teach about capture obligations generally?

    3 min answer secrecordkeepingcaptureretention
  2. Records Retention & Legal Hold advanced

    Your automated retention job deletes records after seven years. Legal informs you that litigation is anticipated involving accounts from nine years ago. What now?

    2 min answer legal-holdretentionarchitecture
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. Redundancy intermediate Multiple choice

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

    2 min answer redundancycapacitycorrelationfailure-domains
  6. 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
  7. 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
  8. 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
  9. 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
  10. 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
  11. Refactoring & Re-architecting advanced

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

    2 min answer rearchitectstranglerrewriteincremental
  12. 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