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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

88 questions in Reliability & Resilience.

  1. Failover advanced

    The business asks for multi-region active-active. Walk through the decision and what it actually requires.

    2 min answer multi-regionfailoverconsistencycost
  2. Failover advanced

    Your database primary is unreachable from the monitoring system but is still serving some clients. Do you fail over?

    2 min answer failoversplit-brainfencingpartition
  3. Fault Isolation intermediate

    A design platform's synchronous editing experience and its asynchronous export rendering share a compute cluster. Exports occasionally saturate it and the editor becomes unusable. What would you change?

    2 min answer fault-isolationbulkheadsworkload-separationcanva
  4. Fault Isolation advanced

    A financial platform's card authorisation path must survive dependency failures, deployments, overloaded downstreams and partial network failures. How should isolation, deadlines, breakers, bulkheads, caching, shedding and fallback combine?

    2 min answer brexrampauthorisationisolation
  5. Fault Isolation advanced

    A security vendor pushes a content update to millions of endpoints simultaneously and a malformed file crashes them all at kernel level. What should have been in place, and why is "it was data, not code" the wrong defence?

    3 min answer crowdstrikestaged-rolloutblast-radiuskernel
  6. Fault Isolation advanced Multiple choice

    What is the single highest-value fault isolation mechanism, and why is it usually missing?

    2 min answer bulkheadspoolscascading-failurecells
  7. Game Days advanced

    A commerce platform prepares for its highest-traffic event of the year. What should a game day rehearse that ordinary load testing does not?

    2 min answer game-dayspeak-readinessdegradationincident-response
  8. Game Days intermediate

    Design a game day for a payment service. What is the scenario, who is in the room, and what counts as success?

    2 min answer game-dayrehearsalincident-responsereadiness
  9. Graceful Degradation advanced

    A payments platform's fraud service is degraded during a peak commerce event. Should the payment path wait, skip the check, use cached risk scores, fall back to simpler rules, or fail? What should determine the answer?

    2 min answer phonepedegradationfraudfallback
  10. Graceful Degradation intermediate Multiple choice

    A recommendation service is unavailable during a high-traffic period. Should the application show popular items, cached recommendations, results from an older model, or nothing at all?

    2 min answer graceful-degradationfallbackpersonalisationreddit
  11. Graceful Degradation intermediate

    A streaming service's homepage assembles rows from a dozen personalisation services. One returns 4-second latency instead of 40 ms. What happens, and what should have been designed?

    2 min answer netflixfallbacktail-latencyfan-out
  12. Graceful Degradation intermediate

    The recommendation service is down. Walk through every level of degraded response and say who decides which one is used.

    2 min answer degradationfallbacknetflixproduct