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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. Constrained Protocols intermediate

    A soil-moisture sensor runs on two AA cells, about 2,000 mAh usable. It wakes every 15 minutes, sends roughly 60 bytes, and sleeps. Sleep draw is about 10 uA. Each transmission cycle takes roughly 2 seconds at an average 30 mA while the radio is active. Estimate the battery life, and say which assumption you would attack first.

    3 min answer batteryduty-cycleenergyiot
  2. Constrained Protocols advanced

    An MQTT 5 broker cluster serving 120,000 sensors starts alerting on disk at 03:00 every night, and the oldest of those alerts is three weeks old. Publish rate is flat at roughly 900 messages per second, connected clients sit at 118,000, and the broker reports 340,000 sessions and rising. No messages are being dropped yet. What failed, and which design decision made it possible?

    3 min answer mqttsessionsbrokerqueueing
  3. Constrained Protocols intermediate

    Devices are battery-powered with intermittent low-bandwidth connectivity. What protocol properties matter, and what is usually chosen wrongly?

    1 min answer protocolsmqttcoappower
  4. Constraint Thinking beginner

    A pipeline has four stages. Three run at about 30% utilisation and one runs at 95%. The team adds capacity to all four. Throughput barely moves. Why?

    2 min answer constraintsthroughputbottleneckqueueing
  5. Constraint Thinking intermediate

    A stakeholder states a requirement as an adjective. How does constraint thinking convert it into something designable?

    2 min answer constraintsrequirementsnumbersdrift
  6. Constraint Thinking beginner Multiple choice

    A team must ship a compliance-driven reporting system by a fixed statutory date nine months away. There are three engineers, no operations staff, an existing Postgres database, and no budget for new licences. Which constraint should drive the architecture?

    3 min answer constraintsoperabilityteam-sizeprioritisation
  7. Constraint Thinking intermediate

    Treat an operator's attention late in an incident as a hard constraint rather than a behaviour to coach. In January 2017 a GitLab engineer working past the end of their shift ran a destructive command against the primary database host instead of the replica. Which controls change that outcome and which are theatre?

    3 min answer gitlabhuman-factorsirreversibilityconstraints
  8. Consumer-Driven Contracts advanced

    A consumer's contract file is regenerated from its own test suite on every build and published to the broker. A developer on the consumer team deletes an obsolete test that happened to be the only one exercising the refund_reason field. Nobody notices at the time. What happens over the following two months?

    3 min answer consumer-driven-contractspactcontract-coveragesilent-failure
  9. Consumer-Driven Contracts intermediate Multiple choice

    A provider service has 40 consumers and a 15-minute pipeline. Contract tests already exist and the provider still breaks consumers in production. Which change actually fixes it?

    2 min answer contract-testingpactdeployment-gateversioning
  10. Consumer-Driven Contracts intermediate Multiple choice

    Twelve services, six teams, one shared event schema plus a dozen REST APIs between them. Breaking changes reach other teams about twice a month, always discovered in the shared staging environment a day or two after the merge. Which verification approach fixes this?

    4 min answer contract testingpactschema registryintegration
  11. Consumer-Driven Contracts advanced

    Why are consumer-driven contracts more useful than provider-published schemas, and what does the direction change?

    2 min answer contractsconsumer-drivendeprecationcoupling
  12. Container Image Strategy intermediate Multiple choice

    A critical CVE in a widely-used C library is announced at 09:00. You have 200 services in containers, each built by its own team's pipeline. Which approach patches the fleet fastest?

    3 min answer supply chainbase imagepatchingautomation