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2667 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 areas2667 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 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

81 questions in Architecture Fundamentals.

  1. Coupling advanced

    A communications API platform finds that adding a new messaging channel requires coordinated changes in the gateway, the billing service, the webhook dispatcher and the console UI, across four teams. What would you change about the coupling, and what should you deliberately leave alone?

    2 min answer couplingextensibilitytwilioapi-platform
  2. Coupling advanced

    A company split its monolith into 14 services. Deployments now require a coordinated release plan across teams and one user action traverses six synchronous hops. What went wrong and what would you do?

    2 min answer couplingmicroservicesdistributed-monolithboundaries
  3. Coupling advanced

    A social product is launched on top of an existing platform's identity, graph and infrastructure, and reaches 100 million users in five days. Which components are safe to borrow, which must be isolated, and what does this say about coupling?

    2 min answer metathreadsinstagramcoupling
  4. Coupling intermediate Multiple choice

    At Meesho-scale marketplace growth, catalogue, pricing, order and logistics teams all read and write one shared product table, each deploying schema changes independently. Which kind of coupling is this, and why does it get worse rather than plateau?

    2 min answer couplingmeeshomarketplaceshared-database
  5. Evolutionary Architecture advanced

    A design platform's rendering service was built for single-page exports. Over three years it accumulated video, animation, bulk export and print output - each bolted onto the same synchronous request path. Exports now time out unpredictably. How should evolutionary architecture have prevented this, and what do you do now?

    2 min answer evolutionary-architecturerenderingcanvaasync
  6. Evolutionary Architecture advanced

    A frequently written table needs a column renamed and its type changed. The service runs many instances and cannot be stopped. How do you do it and remain able to roll back at every step?

    3 min answer migrationszero-downtimeexpand-contractevolutionary
  7. Evolutionary Architecture advanced

    A services marketplace launches in one city with one category. Three years later it runs dozens of categories across many cities with different pricing and compliance rules. What should have been built on day one, and what should deliberately not have been?

    2 min answer evolutionary-architectureurban-companymarketplacelast-responsible-moment
  8. Fitness Functions advanced

    "Interview. You are the architect for a grocery marketplace where item availability changes constantly. Name three fitness functions you would put in CI to protect the architecture, and explain what each one would have caught." What makes a strong answer?

    2 min answer fitness-functionsciinstacartmarketplace
  9. Fitness Functions intermediate Multiple choice

    A broker's order-placement path has a 200ms p99 budget that quietly degraded over eighteen months without any single change being responsible. What kind of control prevents this, and where must it run?

    1 min answer fitness-functionszerodhalatency-budgetpipeline
  10. Fitness Functions advanced

    Architecture decisions in your organisation are either ignored or bottlenecked in a review board. Design something better.

    3 min answer governanceadrfitness-functionsprinciples
  11. Fitness Functions advanced

    In 2023 a team added a build rule forbidding the domain module from importing the persistence module, and it went green. In 2026 the domain module imports persistence in fourteen places and the build is still green. No one disabled the rule and no one edited it. Reconstruct how a passing check ended up protecting nothing.

    3 min answer fitness-functionsarchitecture-testingdriftsilent-failure
  12. Fitness Functions intermediate

    You want to enforce that the domain layer does not depend on infrastructure. How do you make it stick?

    2 min answer governanceautomationevolutionary