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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. Reliability & Resilience advanced

    A super-app combines messaging, payments, social feeds, mini-programs and notifications in one product used by hundreds of millions daily. What is the dominant reliability risk, and what structural property addresses it?

    2 min answer reliabilityisolationsuper-appblast-radius
  2. Reliability & Resilience intermediate

    A team is launching a new service and asks what its SLO should be. How do you help them decide, and why is "99.99%" usually the wrong first answer?

    2 min answer slosreerror-budgetreliability
  3. Reliability & Resilience advanced

    A workflow executes over days or weeks while individual workers restart many times. How should workflow state, timers, retries, heartbeats and task ownership be designed?

    2 min answer temporaldurable-executionworkflowstimers
  4. Reliability & Resilience advanced

    In July 2019 a single regex deployed globally took Cloudflare's network to 100% CPU within seconds. What does this say about how configuration should be released?

    2 min answer deploymentblast-radiusconfigcase-study
  5. Reliability & Resilience advanced

    Maersk rebuilt roughly 4,000 servers and 45,000 PCs in about ten days after NotPetya in 2017, and recovered its directory only because one data centre had been offline during the attack. What does this say about DR design?

    2 min answer disaster-recoveryransomwarebackupcase-study
  6. Reliability & Resilience intermediate

    The business asks for "100% uptime" for a new customer portal. Walk me through the conversation that ends in an agreed SLO.

    3 min answer slisloslanegotiation
  7. Reliability vs Complexity advanced

    A proposed architecture is more reliable in theory and substantially more complex to operate. How should that be evaluated?

    2 min answer reliabilitycomplexityoperated-reliabilityfailure-modes
  8. Reliability vs Complexity advanced

    A team can improve availability by adding several components, each of which is itself a failure point. How should that be evaluated?

    2 min answer railwayreliabilitycomplexityfailure-modes
  9. Reliability vs Complexity advanced

    An order service calls a pricing service. To protect itself it has three retries with jitter, a breaker that opens at a 50% error rate over 10 seconds, a 30-second-TTL fallback cache, and a bulkhead of 20 threads for pricing calls. At 09:00 pricing starts answering in 4 seconds instead of 80 ms, with no errors at all. Pricing normally serves 250 requests per second. Walk through what each of the four mechanisms does, and say which one makes the outage worse.

    3 min answer circuit-breakersretries-backoffbulkheads-isolationtail-latency
  10. Reliability vs Complexity advanced

    Give an example of a reliability mechanism that made a system less reliable, and explain the mechanism.

    2 min answer reliabilitycomplexityamplificationautomation
  11. Rendering Strategies advanced

    A client-rendered single-page application has poor loading performance and poor search visibility across 140 routes. The team wants server rendering with streaming. There is no appetite for a rewrite and the application must keep shipping weekly. What is the sequence, and where can it go wrong?

    3 min answer ssrstreamingmigrationincremental
  12. Rendering Strategies advanced

    A commerce platform must choose between server rendering, static generation, client rendering and streaming for different pages. What decides each?

    2 min answer myntrarenderingssrstatic