Portfolio ↗

Quiz

2627 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 areas2627 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture77 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture78 Reliability & Resilience88 Observability81 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture85 Cost Architecture & FinOps82 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication91 Enterprise Architecture91 Legacy Modernization82 AI-Era Architecture86 Software Architecture & Engineering84 Architecture Patterns84 Architecture Decision-Making91 The Architect's Meta-Skills92 Delivery & Release Engineering93 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience92 Testing & Quality Architecture90 Data Platform Architecture88 Streaming & Real-Time Data93 Data Governance & Semantics81 Frontend & Experience Architecture91 Edge, Mobile & IoT88 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture90 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk88
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

81 questions in Architecture Fundamentals.

  1. Architecture Fundamentals intermediate

    Instagram served 14 million users with three engineers on Django and Postgres. What does that tell you about how to choose an architecture for a new product?

    2 min answer case-studyinstagramsimplicitypragmatism
  2. Architecture Fundamentals advanced

    Prime Video's video-quality monitoring team moved from a serverless step-function pipeline back to a single long-running service and reported a large cost reduction. What actually changed, and which generalisation from this would be wrong?

    2 min answer prime-videoserverlessmonolithcost-per-request
  3. Architecture Fundamentals beginner Multiple choice

    YouTube ingests hundreds of thousands of hours of video a day and serves billions of watch sessions. A new engineer proposes that "the architecture" of YouTube is its choice of programming languages and frameworks. What is wrong with that framing, and what is the architecture actually?

    2 min answer fundamentalsdefinitionyoutubesignificant-decisions
  4. Architecture Principles intermediate

    A commerce platform adopts the principle "every service must survive the failure of any single dependency". A team building an internal analytics dashboard requests an exemption. What does holding the line cost, and what does granting the exemption cost?

    2 min answer principlesexemptionsresilienceshopify
  5. Architecture Principles intermediate

    An organisation's stated principle is "do not build what you can buy". In review it is used to reject an in-house rate limiter for the public API. The vendor option meets every functional need and adds a 40 ms round trip to a request path with a 120 ms p99 budget, and it cannot express the per-tenant burst rules the product sells. The principle is not withdrawn. What did the principle buy the organisation, and what is it now costing?

    3 min answer architecture-principlesbuild-vs-buygovernancelatency-budget
  6. Architecture Principles advanced

    Two teams write to the same set of database tables from two separately deployed services. List the problems this creates and describe how you would evolve out of it.

    3 min answer couplingdata-ownershipprinciplesmigration
  7. Architecture Principles intermediate

    You are asked to produce a technology radar for a 200-engineer organisation with no current standards. How do you build the first one?

    2 min answer radargovernancestandardsconsolidation
  8. Architecture Roles advanced

    A fintech has a central architecture group producing designs that delivery teams then implement, and the designs keep arriving late and slightly wrong. What is the structural problem?

    1 min answer architecture-rolesgrowwgovernancedesign-authority
  9. Architecture Roles intermediate Multiple choice

    During preparation for an extreme flash-sale event, who should own the decision to disable a non-essential feature under load - the architect, the product owner, the on-call engineer, or an automated policy? Choose and justify.

    2 min answer architecture-rolesdegradationflash-salealibaba
  10. Architecture Roles advanced

    Interview prompt. You are the only architect supporting eleven stream-aligned teams. Every design document waits on your review, median wait is nine days, and teams have started shipping without it. The CTO offers to hire two more architects. Tell me what you do.

    3 min answer architecture-rolesteam-topologiesdecision-rightsgovernance
  11. Architecture Roles advanced

    You are the first architect at a 120-engineer company with no architecture function. What do you do in the first ninety days?

    1 min answer meta-skillsonboardinginfluencegovernance
  12. Architecture Roles intermediate

    You join as the architect for a 60-service estate you have never seen. What do you do in the first month?

    2 min answer meta-skillsonboardingpractice