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Quiz

2827 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 areas2827 Architecture Fundamentals91 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture87 Reliability & Resilience99 Observability92 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture95 Cost Architecture & FinOps92 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication91 Enterprise Architecture100 Legacy Modernization92 AI-Era Architecture96 Software Architecture & Engineering93 Architecture Patterns84 Architecture Decision-Making101 The Architect's Meta-Skills92 Delivery & Release Engineering103 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience92 Testing & Quality Architecture102 Data Platform Architecture98 Streaming & Real-Time Data93 Data Governance & Semantics91 Frontend & Experience Architecture101 Edge, Mobile & IoT98 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture99 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk98
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

92 questions in Platform Engineering.

  1. Inner Loop & Outer Loop intermediate

    Engineers report that the platform is fine but daily development is slow. Where should a platform team invest?

    2 min answer swiggyinner-loopdeveloper-experiencefeedback
  2. Inner Loop & Outer Loop intermediate Multiple choice

    Sixty engineers each wait for a build roughly 15 times a day. The build takes 4 minutes. Roughly what does that cost a year, and what does the number rule in or out?

    2 min answer developer experiencebuild timeestimationcost
  3. Inner Loop & Outer Loop beginner Multiple choice

    Two teams own the same test suite. Team A can run the relevant tests locally in 40 seconds. Team B's only way to run them is a 9-minute pipeline. Team B's pull requests are about four times larger and when a test fails they take far longer to work out which change caused it. What is the mechanism connecting feedback time to those two outcomes and which change helps most?

    3 min answer inner loopfeedbackbatch sizetesting
  4. Inner Loop & Outer Loop intermediate

    What distinguishes the inner loop from the outer loop, and where should a platform invest?

    2 min answer inner-loopfeedbackdeveloper-experienceinvestment
  5. Internal Developer Platform advanced

    An organisation is building an internal developer platform. What should be in scope, and what is the most common scoping error?

    2 min answer idpscopeabstractionself-service
  6. Internal Developer Platform advanced

    Leadership asks whether to build an internal developer platform or buy one. Twelve teams, forty services, growing. How do you frame the decision?

    2 min answer platformbuild-vs-buydeveloper-experience
  7. Internal Developer Platform intermediate

    Review this. A 12-engineer startup with 6 services has built an internal developer platform - a React portal, a YAML DSL that generates Terraform, a bespoke secrets service backed by cloud KMS, a service catalogue and a maturity scorecard with 23 checks. Two of the twelve engineers work on it full time. Deploys take 14 minutes and the DSL covers about 60% of what teams need, with the rest hand-written Terraform merged by those two engineers. What would you remove, what would you change, and what would you leave alone?

    3 min answer internal developer platformpragmatismabstractionbuild-vs-buy
  8. Internal Developer Platform intermediate

    Your service catalogue says every service has an owner. Investigating an incident, you find the named owner left the company eight months ago. How do you prevent this class of problem?

    2 min answer catalogueownershipmetadata
  9. Paved Road & Golden Path intermediate

    A team says the golden path cannot support their workload and wants to build their own deployment tooling. How do you respond?

    2 min answer platformstandardsautonomy
  10. Paved Road & Golden Path intermediate

    Review this golden path. A new service starts with a portal form of 34 required fields; an architecture reviewer approves it within two days; the generator then creates a repository with build and deploy wired in. It does not create the database, the DNS record or the on-call rota, which are three tickets taking four to nine days. In the last year 18 of 60 new services went through it. What would you remove, what would you change, and what would you leave alone?

    3 min answer golden pathself-serviceadoptionreview
  11. Paved Road & Golden Path intermediate

    What makes a paved road actually get used, and what is the mistake that undermines it?

    2 min answer paved-roadadoptionspeedvariation
  12. Platform Adoption intermediate

    A platform capability is objectively better than what teams are doing, and adoption is low. How should the gap be diagnosed?

    1 min answer adoptionmigrationincentivesdeveloper-experience