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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. Cross-Border Transfer intermediate Multiple choice

    An EU-based SaaS product runs entirely in Frankfurt. Its 24-hour support rota includes engineers in a country without an adequacy decision, who can view customer records to diagnose issues. Legal flags this as a cross-border transfer. Which control best addresses the finding?

    3 min answer cross-border-transfersupport-accessdata-minimisationscc
  2. Cross-Border Transfer advanced

    Your SaaS vendor processes EU customer data in the US. Legal asks for supplementary measures. What can architecture offer?

    2 min answer gdprtransfersencryption
  3. Cutover Planning intermediate

    A cutover is planned for a Sunday night. What must be prepared beyond the technical steps, and what is the most commonly missing item?

    2 min answer ackocutoverrollbackrunbook
  4. Cutover Planning intermediate

    A platform must cut over a critical service. What does a cutover plan need beyond the switching steps?

    2 min answer cutoverrollbackrehearsalcommunication
  5. Cutover Planning advanced

    Alibaba Cloud reported a peak of 583,000 orders per second during Singles' Day on 11 November 2020. Your own platform is far smaller but its annual peak is roughly 40 times a median day and its date is known a year in advance. How does that one fact reshape an eighteen-month migration plan?

    3 min answer alibabapeak eventscutoverfreeze
  6. Cutover Planning intermediate

    What is in a cutover plan besides the steps, and what would you rehearse?

    1 min answer cutoverrollbackabort-criteriarehearsal
  7. Dashboards intermediate

    A platform has hundreds of dashboards and engineers cannot find the right one during an incident. How should dashboards be structured?

    2 min answer dashboardsincident-responsehierarchybooking
  8. Dashboards intermediate

    Design the one dashboard your team opens first during an incident. What is on it and what is deliberately not?

    2 min answer dashboardsincident-responsedesignobservability
  9. Dashboards intermediate

    Review this incident dashboard. One page holds 28 panels, the default range is 6 hours, auto-refresh is 10 seconds, the scrape interval is 30 seconds, and every panel plots a 5-minute rate over per-pod series for a 900-pod fleet. During the last incident the page took 40 seconds to load and two panels timed out. What would you remove, what would you change, and what would you leave alone?

    3 min answer dashboardsquery-costresolutionincident-response
  10. Dashboards intermediate

    Review this: the payments team's primary dashboard has 62 panels on one page — CPU, memory, disk and network for each of 9 services, JVM heap and GC for each, connection-pool gauges, Kafka consumer lag, and three panels at the bottom showing authorisation rate, settlement latency and decline reasons. On-call says it is "comprehensive". The last two incidents were diagnosed from logs. What do you remove, what do you change, and what do you leave alone?

    4 min answer dashboardson-callgolden signalsalert design
  11. Dashboards intermediate

    Your metrics pipeline normally makes data queryable about 20 seconds after it is emitted. During a large incident the ingestion tier falls behind and the lag grows to four minutes. Nothing is lost. Walk through what happens to the on-call engineer's decisions.

    3 min answer telemetry lagincident responserollbackalerting
  12. Data Access Models advanced

    A data platform carries four years of accumulated standing grants: about 900 analysts in roughly 300 groups with permanent read on 6,000 tables. Legal now requires that purpose be recorded and access be time-boxed. You cannot stop analysts working for a day. Give the sequence.

    3 min answer access controljust-in-time accesspurpose limitationaudit