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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

91 questions in Architecture Decision-Making.

  1. Centralised vs Distributed advanced

    When does a shared platform stop helping and start constraining, and what signal tells you?

    2 min answer platformcentralisationbottleneckautonomy
  2. Centralised vs Distributed intermediate

    When is a centralised architecture with a single relational database and vertically scaled application the right answer?

    2 min answer centralisedsimplicityscaleevidence
  3. Strong vs Eventual Consistency advanced

    A booking platform must decide where strong consistency is required. How should the decision be made, and how is it communicated to application developers?

    2 min answer consistencyinvariantsguaranteescommunication
  4. Strong vs Eventual Consistency advanced

    A flash sale puts 500 units of one product in front of 200,000 concurrent shoppers. Design the inventory path.

    2 min answer retailhot-keyinventorycontention
  5. Strong vs Eventual Consistency advanced

    A grocery marketplace shows store availability from a read model fed by change-data-capture streams from each retailer's inventory system. Normal lag is 2 to 4 seconds. During the Saturday peak the stream backs up to 90 seconds and stays there for 20 minutes. Nothing errors and no alert fires. What happens, and which mechanism stops it?

    3 min answer consistencycdcstalenesssubstitutions
  6. Strong vs Eventual Consistency advanced Multiple choice

    A lodging marketplace must show accurate availability across search, listing pages and booking. Which of these need strong consistency?

    2 min answer airbnbconsistencyinventorysearch
  7. Strong vs Eventual Consistency advanced

    Which operations in a ticketing system need strong consistency and which are correct with eventual consistency?

    2 min answer consistencyinvariantsper-operationinventory
  8. Architecture Decision-Making advanced

    An architecture review reveals a proposed system requiring service discovery, several databases, distributed locks, a message broker, CQRS, event sourcing, a container orchestrator and a service mesh - for a workload expected to have a few thousand users. What would you simplify and how would you justify it?

    2 min answer zeptoover-engineeringsimplicityjustification
  9. Architecture Decision-Making advanced

    An organisation makes architectural decisions slowly and revisits them repeatedly. What structural changes improve decision quality and speed together?

    2 min answer decision-makingdecision-rightsreversibilityevidence
  10. Architecture Decision-Making advanced

    Netflix built its own CDN; Dropbox moved storage off S3. Both are usually wrong. What conditions made them right, and how do you test for those conditions?

    2 min answer case-studybuild-vs-buynetflixdropbox
  11. Architecture Decision-Making intermediate

    Security wants mandatory hardware keys for every login; the business says it will cost conversions. How do you resolve it architecturally rather than by picking a side?

    2 min answer securityusabilityriskauthentication
  12. Architecture Decision-Making intermediate

    The team can ship in six weeks with an approach that will need rework, or five months with one that will not. How do you decide, and what do you do either way?

    2 min answer technical-debtdeliverytrade-offssequencing