Portfolio ↗

Quiz

2667 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 areas2667 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture78 Reliability & Resilience88 Observability81 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture95 Cost Architecture & FinOps92 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication91 Enterprise Architecture91 Legacy Modernization92 AI-Era Architecture86 Software Architecture & Engineering84 Architecture Patterns84 Architecture Decision-Making91 The Architect's Meta-Skills92 Delivery & Release Engineering93 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience92 Testing & Quality Architecture90 Data Platform Architecture88 Streaming & Real-Time Data93 Data Governance & Semantics81 Frontend & Experience Architecture91 Edge, Mobile & IoT88 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture90 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk88
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

81 questions in Architecture Fundamentals.

  1. Functional vs Non-Functional intermediate

    "Interview. Etsy has millions of sellers listing handmade items and buyers browsing and searching them. Give me the functional requirements in thirty seconds, then tell me which non-functional requirement actually determines the architecture, and why." How should a strong candidate answer?

    1 min answer nfrmarketplacesearchetsy
  2. Functional vs Non-Functional intermediate Multiple choice

    "Place an order" and "an order placed during the market open surge is acknowledged within 200ms at p99" — Zerodha needs both. Which one actually constrains the architecture, and why is that not obvious?

    1 min answer nfrzerodhatradinglatency
  3. Functional vs Non-Functional beginner Multiple choice

    A marketplace ships saved-search alerts. The functional spec is one sentence - email a seller when a new listing matches their saved query - and it works. Six weeks after launch, alerts arrive anywhere between 4 minutes and 9 hours after the listing appears, and nobody can say whether that is a defect, because no one wrote down how fresh an alert had to be. Which of these is the missing non-functional requirement?

    2 min answer non-functional-requirementsfreshnessquality-attributeconstraints
  4. Functional vs Non-Functional beginner Multiple choice

    A news organisation's site is functionally simple - editors publish articles and readers read them - yet its architecture is unusually elaborate. Which non-functional characteristic explains that, and what structure does it force?

    2 min answer nfrcachingcdnread-heavy
  5. Modularity intermediate

    A developer platform composes Postgres, an auth service, storage, realtime subscriptions and an auto-generated API into one product. What makes that modular rather than merely multi-component, and what is the test?

    1 min answer modularitysupabasereplaceabilitycomposition
  6. Modularity intermediate

    A startup with 20 engineers and steady moderate traffic proposes moving to microservices to prepare for growth. What would you recommend and under what conditions would you change your mind?

    3 min answer modular-monolithmicroservicesteam-sizeshopify
  7. Modularity advanced

    A team is splitting a monolith into services. How do you decide where the boundaries go?

    3 min answer boundariescouplingcohesionconway
  8. Modularity advanced

    A travel platform integrates hundreds of suppliers, each with different APIs, latencies, reliability and data quality. How should modularity be applied, and what specifically goes wrong in platforms that get this boundary wrong?

    2 min answer modularityintegrationsuppliersexpedia
  9. Quality Attributes beginner

    A developer-tools team writes "the workspace must be fast and reliable" into a design document. What is wrong with that, and what should it say instead?

    1 min answer quality-attributespostmanscenariostestability
  10. Quality Attributes intermediate Multiple choice

    A product manager asks to tighten the API latency target from p99 300 ms to p99 100 ms. What should the architect do before agreeing?

    2 min answer quality-attributesnfrtradeoffscost
  11. Quality Attributes intermediate

    A project is three sprints from launch and no non-functional requirements were ever written down. What do you do?

    1 min answer nfrrequirementsquality-attributes
  12. Quality Attributes advanced

    A streaming platform is adding scheduled live events to a catalogue service that has always served on-demand content. Which quality attributes change, and why is this not "the same system with more traffic"?

    2 min answer netflixlive-streamingquality-attributesdrivers