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Quiz

98 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 areas98 Architecture Fundamentals2 Distributed Systems26 Data Architecture23 Cloud Architecture4 Networking3 API & Integration Architecture1 Reliability & Resilience4 Observability3 Performance & Capacity Engineering3 Security Architecture3 Cost Architecture & FinOps3 Business Architecture2 Architecture Communication2 Enterprise Architecture1 Legacy Modernization2 AI-Era Architecture3 Software Architecture & Engineering3 Architecture Patterns3 Architecture Decision-Making6 The Architect's Meta-Skills1
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

98 questions.

  1. Business Architecture intermediate

    A startup asks you to architect their product "to handle millions of users". They currently have none. What do you actually build?

    2 min answer time-to-marketpragmatismconstraintsproduct
  2. Business Architecture advanced

    Southwest cancelled about 16,700 flights in December 2022 when crew scheduling could not recover from a storm, after years of deferred modernisation. How do you make that argument before the failure rather than after?

    3 min answer technical-debtriskmodernizationcase-study
  3. CAP & PACELC advanced

    Classify DynamoDB, Spanner and Cassandra under PACELC, and say which half of the classification you would actually design around.

    2 min answer pacelcconsistencylatencydatastores
  4. CAP & PACELC advanced

    You run active-active across two regions. The link between them fails. What should each region do, and what would you have designed differently?

    2 min answer partitionquorummulti-regionavailability
  5. Change Data Capture advanced

    A downstream team needs to react to order changes. The order service can publish events, or they can consume CDC from its database. Which, and why?

    2 min answer cdceventscouplingintegration
  6. Circuit Breakers intermediate Multiple choice

    A team proposes circuit breakers on every downstream call. What would you add, and why is the breaker not the most important control?

    2 min answer circuit-breakerbulkheadisolationfallback
  7. Circuit Breakers advanced

    After adding circuit breakers, a partial outage now lasts three times longer than it used to. What is likely happening?

    1 min answer circuit-breakerrecoveryoscillation
  8. Cloud Architecture intermediate

    A team tells you backups run nightly and are retained for 30 days. What is missing from that answer?

    2 min answer backupdisaster-recoveryverificationransomware
  9. Cloud Architecture intermediate Multiple choice

    A team wants to build a new internal API on serverless functions. It will serve steady traffic of about 200 requests per second during business hours. What do you advise?

    2 min answer serverlesscontainerscostdecision-making
  10. Cloud Architecture advanced

    In the 2017 AWS S3 outage, the status page could not report the outage because it depended on S3. What does that tell you about designing status and control systems?

    2 min answer blast-radiuscontrol-planedependenciescase-study
  11. Cloud Architecture advanced

    The business asks for "multi-region" after a regional outage. Before agreeing, what do you need to establish, and what are you actually signing up for?

    2 min answer multi-regiondrcostconsistency
  12. Architecture Communication intermediate

    In a design review, a respected senior engineer proposes an approach you believe is wrong. The room defers to them. How do you handle it?

    2 min answer communicationdisagreementinfluencereview