Portfolio ↗

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.

  1. Cloud Databases intermediate Multiple choice

    A serverless API works in testing and fails under load with connection errors. The database is at 5% CPU. Explain and fix.

    2 min answer serverlessconnectionsproxyscaling
  2. Disaster Recovery intermediate Multiple choice

    A grocery-delivery marketplace peaks for three hours on Sunday morning and keeps orders in a single-region managed Postgres with multi-zone failover. After a competitor's regional outage the board asks for a 15-minute recovery time and zero data loss against the loss of the whole region. Which posture should the team adopt?

    3 min answer cloud-disaster-recoveryrpo-rtowarm-standbyentity-homing
  3. Disaster Recovery intermediate

    An enterprise platform with strict availability commitments must define its disaster recovery strategy. How should RTO and RPO targets drive the choice between backup restore, warm standby, and active-active?

    2 min answer disaster-recoveryrtorpocost
  4. Disaster Recovery advanced

    You plan a regional failover. Name every dependency that must already exist in the second region for the plan to be executable, not just for traffic to be served.

    2 min answer drfailovercontrol-planedependencies
  5. Cloud Governance intermediate

    A DR test fails: the secondary region cannot launch enough instances. What happened, and what standing checks prevent it?

    2 min answer quotasdrgovernance
  6. Cloud Governance intermediate

    A platform's cloud spend has grown faster than traffic for six consecutive quarters, with no single service responsible. What governance changes address this, and why do purely technical optimisations fail to hold?

    2 min answer cloud-governancefinopscost-attributionaccountability
  7. Cloud Governance advanced

    Several 2023–2024 regional cloud outages were triggered by automated control-plane or configuration changes rather than by hardware failure or code deploys. How should change management, progressive rollout and control/data-plane independence be designed?

    2 min answer azurecontrol-planeconfigurationprogressive-rollout
  8. Cloud Governance advanced

    You inherit a cloud estate with one account, no tags, shared root credentials and no policy enforcement. What are your first three changes and in what order?

    2 min answer governancelanding-zoneidentitytagging
  9. Load Balancing intermediate

    A live-learning platform expects a synchronised audience for a single scheduled class. How should video delivery, interactive features, enrolment and notifications be architected differently from each other?

    2 min answer unacademylive-videocdnfan-out
  10. Load Balancing intermediate Multiple choice

    A mobility platform must route API traffic, long-lived driver location streams and internal service calls. Which load-balancing layer suits each, and what breaks if one choice is applied uniformly?

    2 min answer load-balancinglayer4layer7websockets
  11. Load Balancing beginner

    A ticket drop at 10:00 takes a site from 200 requests per second to 25000 in under 30 seconds. The application fleet was pre-scaled the night before and sits at 4% CPU. For the first two minutes clients get connection timeouts and 503s that never reach a backend. What happens second by second and what stops it?

    3 min answer cloud-load-balancingpeak-event-readinessdnspre-warming
  12. Load Balancing intermediate

    At 11:40 autoscaling adds 20 instances to a 40-instance fleet as request rate doubles. By 11:43 p99 has gone from 300 ms to 7 s with a 4% error rate while average CPU across the fleet is 35%. By 11:55 nothing has been changed and p99 is back to 320 ms. What failed and which configuration decision made it possible?

    2 min answer cloud-load-balancingautoscalingslow-starttail-latency