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Quiz

174 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 areas174 Architecture Fundamentals5 Distributed Systems26 Data Architecture23 Cloud Architecture19 Networking17 API & Integration Architecture13 Reliability & Resilience9 Observability8 Performance & Capacity Engineering6 Security Architecture16 Cost Architecture & FinOps3 Business Architecture2 Architecture Communication2 Enterprise Architecture1 Legacy Modernization2 AI-Era Architecture3 Software Architecture & Engineering3 Architecture Patterns6 Architecture Decision-Making9 The Architect's Meta-Skills1
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

174 questions.

  1. Contract Testing advanced

    Integration failures between 30 services are found in a shared staging environment, days after merge. Propose a change.

    2 min answer contract-testingciintegrationorganisation
  2. Cost & FinOps advanced

    A design review presents a new event-driven platform. What cost questions do you ask before approving it?

    2 min answer finopscost-modelreviewegress
  3. Cost & FinOps intermediate

    Finance wants to cut cloud spend by committing to one-year and three-year reservations. What do you commit to, and what could go wrong?

    2 min answer finopscommitmentsreservationscost
  4. Cost & FinOps intermediate

    The cloud bill has tripled in six months while traffic grew 40%. How do you find out why, and what do you expect to find?

    2 min answer finopscostdiagnosisegress
  5. CQRS intermediate Multiple choice

    A team proposes CQRS for a CRUD admin panel because reads are slow. Is that the right call?

    2 min answer cqrsover-engineeringread-model
  6. CQRS advanced

    A team proposes CQRS with event sourcing for a new service. How do you evaluate the proposal?

    2 min answer cqrsevent-sourcingcomplexitydecision
  7. Data Architecture intermediate

    A dashboard query that took 200ms now takes 40 seconds. The table has grown to 200 million rows. Walk me through diagnosis and fix, including what you would not do.

    3 min answer indexingquery-performancedatabasesdiagnosis
  8. Data Architecture advanced

    A multi-tenant SaaS product has outgrown one database. You must shard. How do you choose the partition key, and what makes this decision so expensive to get wrong?

    2 min answer shardingpartitioningmulti-tenancyscaling
  9. Data Architecture intermediate

    A product catalogue page does 40,000 reads per second against a database that can serve 5,000. Walk me through the caching design, including what happens at 3 AM when the cache is empty.

    2 min answer cachingperformancestampedeavailability
  10. Data Architecture intermediate Multiple choice

    A service writes to its database and then publishes an event to Kafka. Sometimes consumers see an event for a record that does not exist, and sometimes a record exists with no event. Why, and how do you fix it?

    2 min answer outboxconsistencyevent-drivenintegration
  11. Data Architecture advanced

    Discord stores trillions of messages. What is their partition key, and what problem does the second half of it solve?

    2 min answer case-studydiscordpartitioninghot-partition
  12. Data Architecture advanced

    Netflix personalises an entire home page in the time a TV takes to draw a screen. How, given that scoring every title for every member on request is impossible?

    2 min answer case-studynetflixprecomputationcqrs