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Quiz

2707 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 areas2707 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture78 Reliability & Resilience88 Observability81 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture95 Cost Architecture & FinOps92 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication91 Enterprise Architecture91 Legacy Modernization92 AI-Era Architecture96 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 Architecture98 Streaming & Real-Time Data93 Data Governance & Semantics91 Frontend & Experience Architecture91 Edge, Mobile & IoT88 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture90 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk98
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

2707 questions.

  1. Build vs Buy intermediate

    In February 2022 Akamai announced it would acquire Linode for about $900 million and closed the deal in March 2022 at a purchase price of $898.8 million, adding an infrastructure-as-a-service business to a company that already ran one of the largest edge delivery networks. Akamai had the network, the capital and the engineers to build compute. What made buying the right call, and where would copying this be a mistake?

    3 min answer akamailinodebuild-vs-buyacquisition
  2. Build vs Buy intermediate

    What evidence should drive a build-versus-buy decision, and which arguments on each side are usually made badly?

    2 min answer build-vs-buydifferentiationtcovendor
  3. Bulkheads & Isolation advanced

    A multi-tenant SaaS platform is degraded for everyone because one enterprise tenant is running ten times its normal workload. What would you change so that this tenant's burst cannot affect the others?

    2 min answer bulkheadsmulti-tenancynoisy-neighboursalesforce
  4. Bulkheads & Isolation advanced

    A service calls four dependencies. How do you size its thread pools, and why is the total often smaller than people expect?

    2 min answer bulkheadpoolslittles-lawsizing
  5. Bulkheads & Isolation advanced

    A trading platform receives a burst of market-data updates while thousands of customers submit orders. How should market-data distribution, order execution, risk checks and user-facing APIs be separated so that non-critical workloads cannot interfere with trading?

    2 min answer zerodhatradingbulkheadsisolation
  6. Bulkheads & Isolation advanced

    You add separate connection pools per downstream dependency for isolation. Shortly afterwards the database starts refusing connections. What happened?

    2 min answer bulkheadspoolscapacity
  7. Bulkheads & Isolation advanced

    You are asked to make a multi-tenant SaaS resilient to "any single failure". You propose cells. What must you find before that claim is true?

    2 min answer cellsisolationblast-radiusdependencies
  8. Business Architecture advanced

    A company operates marketplaces, payments, logistics and cloud services as one ecosystem. What does business architecture contribute that technical architecture does not?

    2 min answer business-architecturecapabilitiesecosystemboundaries
  9. 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
  10. Business Architecture advanced

    Since 2023 Oracle has sold Java SE through a single Universal Subscription priced per employee rather than per processor or per named user. A 12,000-employee group has Oracle JDK builds on 40 servers and roughly 900 laptops and plans to cut that footprint. What changed about their options, and where would copying the obvious response be a mistake?

    3 min answer oraclejavalicensingvendor metrics
  11. 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
  12. Business Capabilities advanced

    A retailer validates and stores a customer delivery address in three places: checkout, the logistics planner, and support tooling. Each implementation is defensible on its own terms and each team resists change. About 3% of orders fail first-time delivery for address-quality reasons. Walk me through how you would approach this.

    3 min answer capabilitiesownershipmaster databoundaries