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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. Coexistence Patterns advanced

    Eighteen months into a coexistence period, customer records are authoritative in the new system and order records are still authoritative in the old one. A refund credits the customer and cancels the order line. What happens the first time the credit commits and the cancellation is rejected?

    3 min answer coexistencewrite ownershipsagascompensation
  2. Coexistence Patterns advanced

    Old and new stores both hold 42 million customer records during a coexistence period. The nightly full-row comparison now takes 6 hours 40 minutes against a 4-hour window, and the legacy side serves the export at about 1800 rows per second. Roughly what does a hash-bucket comparison cost instead, and which assumption decides whether it fits?

    3 min answer coexistence-patternsreconciliationmerklehashing
  3. Coexistence Patterns advanced

    Your cutover plan says switch reads, then switch writes, then decommission. A reviewer asks what happens at 02:00 if the new store turns out to be wrong after writes have moved. What mechanism makes the write switch reversible, and what is the honest unavailability window?

    3 min answer youtubevitesscutoverreverse-replication
  4. Cohesion advanced Multiple choice

    A search company must decide where the rules deciding which documents are eligible to appear for a query should live - the crawler, the indexer, the query serving layer, or a dedicated component. Which choice best reflects cohesion?

    2 min answer cohesionsearchbaiduboundaries
  5. Cohesion intermediate

    A subscription-billing platform has an "invoice service" that generates invoices, sends dunning emails, computes tax, syncs to accounting systems and renders PDFs. Is that cohesive? How would you decide?

    1 min answer cohesionchargebeebillingboundaries
  6. Cohesion intermediate Multiple choice

    Every meaningful feature in a platform requires changes to at least nine services and three teams. Which architectural property has failed and what is the diagnostic?

    2 min answer cohesionboundariesconways-lawspotify
  7. Cohesion beginner

    Review this. An internal library called platform-common holds an HTTP client, a feature-flag reader, a money type, a retry helper and tenant-context propagation. 140 services depend on it. A one-line bugfix to the money type produces version 4.12.0, and until each service upgrades it is running a version missing the fix. The last upgrade wave took eleven weeks. What would you split, and what would you leave alone?

    3 min answer cohesionshared-librariesversioningrelease-cadence
  8. Architecture Communication intermediate

    An architect presents the same architecture deck to executives, engineers and a security review board, and each audience is dissatisfied. What is wrong with the approach?

    2 min answer communicationaudiencealtitudeatlassian
  9. Architecture Communication advanced

    An interviewer asks how you decide how much to say publicly, and how often, during an incident in which you have lost customer data. GitLab live-streamed its January 2017 database recovery and kept a publicly visible running document. Argue both sides of that level of disclosure, and say what you would commit to.

    3 min answer gitlabincident communicationdisclosuretransparency
  10. Architecture Communication intermediate

    In a design review, a respected senior engineer proposes an approach you believe is wrong. The room defers to them. How do you handle it?

    2 min answer communicationdisagreementinfluencereview
  11. Architecture Communication beginner

    You have designed a system. Explain the same architecture to a CEO, an engineering manager and an engineer. What changes?

    2 min answer communicationstakeholdersinfluence
  12. Competing Consumers advanced

    A queue-backed worker pool processes image jobs. One consumer's process is alive and its health check passes, but it is blocked in a socket read to a storage service that never returns and has no timeout. Queue depth looks normal. What happens over the next hour and what would have caught it?

    3 min answer competing consumerslivenesstimeoutsqueue