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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. Data Architecture advanced Multiple choice

    Uber indexes the world with hexagons rather than squares for surge pricing and dispatch. Why does the shape matter, and what is the general lesson?

    2 min answer case-studyubergeospatialindexing
  2. Data Governance intermediate

    A dashboard has been wrong for three weeks. Nobody knows which upstream produced the table it reads. What is the governance failure, and what fixes it?

    2 min answer governancelineageownershipcontracts
  3. Data Lakes & Lakehouses advanced

    You are asked to choose between a cloud data warehouse and a lakehouse for a new analytics platform. How do you decide?

    2 min answer lakehousewarehouselock-indecision-making
  4. Data Lifecycle & Retention advanced

    A GDPR erasure request arrives for a customer. Where does their data actually live, and what makes this expensive to retrofit?

    2 min answer gdprerasureprivacylifecycle
  5. Data Warehousing advanced

    A finance report double-counts revenue after a new fact table is added. What is the likely modelling error?

    2 min answer warehousegrainfan-outdimensional-modelling
  6. Debugging Distributed Systems advanced

    A platform of 40 services has logs only, and incidents take hours to diagnose. Design the observability strategy and its rollout order.

    2 min answer observabilitytracingmetricsrollout
  7. Architecture Decision-Making advanced

    Netflix built its own CDN; Dropbox moved storage off S3. Both are usually wrong. What conditions made them right, and how do you test for those conditions?

    2 min answer case-studybuild-vs-buynetflixdropbox
  8. Architecture Decision-Making intermediate

    Security wants mandatory hardware keys for every login; the business says it will cost conversions. How do you resolve it architecturally rather than by picking a side?

    2 min answer securityusabilityriskauthentication
  9. Architecture Decision-Making intermediate

    The team can ship in six weeks with an approach that will need rework, or five months with one that will not. How do you decide, and what do you do either way?

    2 min answer technical-debtdeliverytrade-offssequencing
  10. Architecture Decision-Making beginner

    When is an architectural decision worth an ADR, and what makes an ADR useful two years later?

    2 min answer adrdocumentationgovernance
  11. Architecture Decision-Making intermediate Multiple choice

    When should a service call another synchronously, and when should it publish an event instead? Give me the deciding test, not a preference.

    2 min answer syncasynccouplingavailability
  12. Architecture Decision-Making intermediate

    You are reviewing a design for an internal tool with 200 users. It proposes Kubernetes, microservices, Kafka, a service mesh and CQRS. How do you handle the review?

    2 min answer over-engineeringreviewpragmatismgovernance