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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

84 questions in Software Architecture.

  1. Refactoring advanced

    Figma's database stack grew roughly 100x between 2020 and 2024. Rather than rewriting the application to be shard-aware in one step, the team vertically partitioned first, then introduced logical sharding, where queries still ran against a single database but were routed as if it were already sharded. Why is that intermediate step worth its cost, and what does it find that a cutover cannot?

    3 min answer figmapostgresshardingrefactoring
  2. Release Strategies advanced

    A brokerage must deploy without disrupting customers who may be mid-transaction. Which release strategy fits, and what does it require?

    2 min answer growwreleasecanarydraining
  3. Release Strategies advanced

    A collaborative product with long-lived client connections needs zero-downtime releases. How do rolling, blue-green and canary differ here?

    2 min answer releasestatefulconnectionscanary
  4. Release Strategies advanced

    A regulated business releases every two weeks through a change advisory board. Engineering wants continuous deployment. The control is real: an auditor tests that every production change was authorised, risk-assessed, tested and reversible. Sequence the migration.

    3 min answer continuous deploymentchange managementauditstandard change
  5. Release Strategies advanced

    At 14:05 a canary on 5% of traffic passes automated analysis across 60 metrics and is promoted. At 14:40 the fleet error rate is 12 times baseline. The canary's own dashboards were clean the entire time. What made the canary blind, and which design decision allowed it?

    3 min answer canaryprogressive deliverystatisticssilent failure
  6. Release Strategies advanced

    You roll back a deployment and the system is still broken. What are the likely reasons?

    2 min answer rollbackmigrationscompatibilitystate
  7. Service Boundaries advanced

    A team is splitting a service and discovers the split would break a transaction. What are the options, and which is usually right?

    2 min answer temporalboundariestransactionssaga
  8. Service Boundaries advanced Multiple choice

    A team proposes extracting a service. What single test best predicts whether the boundary is right?

    2 min answer service-boundarieschange-historyevidencecoupling
  9. Service Boundaries advanced

    A team split a monolith into 14 services. Every feature now touches 4 or 5 of them, and releases are coordinated weekly. What would you change?

    2 min answer distributed-monolithboundariesremediation
  10. Service Boundaries intermediate Multiple choice

    For a retailer, should order management, payment and fulfilment be one service or three?

    2 min answer retailboundariescouplingdecision
  11. Service Boundaries advanced

    Netflix moved from a very large number of fine-grained microservices toward fewer, better-bounded services. What signals indicate that service boundaries are wrong, and how would you execute a consolidation safely?

    2 min answer netflixmicroservicesboundariesconsolidation
  12. Service Boundaries intermediate

    Two services share a database because it was faster to build that way. Both teams now block each other on every schema change. What do you do?

    1 min answer couplingdatamicroservicesrefactoring