Quiz

2741 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 areas2741 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture78 Reliability & Resilience99 Observability92 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 Architecture102 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

2741 questions.

Quiz

A game hosts a scheduled in-world event for 30 million concurrent players. How should matchmaking, instance allocation, pre-scaling, login queues and degradation be planned, and what is rehearsed?

A training cluster has 512 NVIDIA H100-class GPUs in 64 eight-GPU nodes and the scheduler reports 96 GPUs free. Roughly how much collective bandwidth per GPU does a new 64-GPU job get, and what should the capacity report say instead of "96 GPUs free"?

Alibaba reported a peak of 583,000 order creations per second during Singles' Day in 2020. Suppose one promoted item accounts for 0.5% of those orders and its stock is held in a single row. Roughly how many updates per second does that row have to absorb?

You run in three availability zones and must survive losing one. What is your maximum normal utilisation and why?

A live-streaming platform of Twitch's shape needs usable latency quantiles for 300 API endpoints whose responses span 2 ms to 90 seconds. The current histograms use 12 fixed buckets topping out at 10 seconds and every p99 above that reads as the overflow bucket. Which change fits the problem?

A single deploy took down your monitoring platform. What happened, and how do you prevent a recurrence?

A team wants to debug failures nobody predicted, using wide high-cardinality events rather than pre-aggregated metrics. How does the storage design differ, and how must sampling preserve rare errors?

An observability platform ingests billions of telemetry events daily, and some customers attach dimensions with unbounded distinct values. How should ingestion, storage, indexing and query be designed so cost and latency stay manageable?

An observability platform ingests enormous telemetry volume, but a small number of dimensions create extreme cardinality. How should ingestion, aggregation, indexing, sampling, retention and storage tiers be designed so cost and query performance stay predictable?

An engineer wants to become an architect. What should they deliberately practise, and what commonly stalls the transition?

An interviewer asks: "Tell me about an architectural decision you got wrong." What is being tested, what does a weak answer look like, and what does a strong one contain?