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

Spanner uses TrueTime — an API that returns a bounded time interval rather than a timestamp — to provide externally consistent distributed transactions. What problem does this solve, what does it cost, and when is the cost not worth paying?

Two regions both accept writes to the same user record and resolve conflicts by last-write-wins on timestamp. Users report edits silently disappearing. Explain and fix.

A cost-sensitive education platform must serve large enrolment spikes and heavy video delivery on a tight budget. Which architectural choices give the largest cost reduction per unit of effort?

A deployment platform's control plane goes down. What should happen to customer applications already serving traffic, and what does that requirement force into the architecture?

A real-time conferencing platform must serve unpredictable demand that once grew thirtyfold in ten weeks, where media relaying is bandwidth-intensive and latency-critical. Should it run on public cloud, its own data centres, or both - and what decides?

A team tells you backups run nightly and are retained for 30 days. What is missing from that answer?

A team wants to build a new internal API on serverless functions. It will serve steady traffic of about 200 requests per second during business hours. What do you advise?

In the 2017 AWS S3 outage, the status page could not report the outage because it depended on S3. What does that tell you about designing status and control systems?

The December 2021 us-east-1 event began with internal network congestion that impaired the region's control plane, and customers found they could not even read the service health dashboard. What are the three durable architectural lessons, independent of the specific bug?

The business asks for "multi-region" after a regional outage. Before agreeing, what do you need to establish, and what are you actually signing up for?

A managed database performs a routine minor-version upgrade with a 40-second failover. The application returns errors throughout. Whose problem is this?

A multi-product SaaS company runs its own database clusters on cloud instances and is considering moving to the provider's managed database service. What evidence should decide it?