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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. Quality Attributes intermediate

    What happens if a global content delivery platform sets a quality-attribute target of "cache hit ratio above 95%" and simultaneously "content updates visible worldwide within 5 seconds"? Explain the conflict and how it is normally resolved.

    2 min answer quality-attributescachingcdnakamai
  2. Quality Attributes advanced

    You are starting a greenfield platform. How do you establish what the architecture must satisfy before designing anything?

    2 min answer driversquality-attributesconstraintsmethod
  3. Reference Models intermediate

    A B2B procurement platform adopts an industry reference model for its catalogue and order domain. When does that help, and when does it become a liability?

    1 min answer reference-modelsmoglixprocurementstandards
  4. Reference Models intermediate Multiple choice

    A team adopts a cloud vendor's reference architecture wholesale to run two containers and a database. The result is a hub-and-spoke network with a firewall appliance and three subscription boundaries. What went wrong?

    2 min answer reference-modelsover-engineeringsimplicitymicrosoft
  5. Reference Models intermediate

    A travel platform is building its third availability-and-pricing integration in two years, each with a different internal shape. An architect proposes a reference model. What should it contain to be useful, and what makes reference models fail in practice?

    2 min answer reference-modelsstandardisationbookingintegration
  6. Reference Models advanced

    Four years ago a platform team adopted a cloud vendor's landing-zone reference architecture whole: hub-and-spoke network, three subscription tiers, a central firewall appliance, a shared CI account. The estate turned out to be three products and 40 engineers. The appliance adds a 12 ms hop to every internal call and caused two of the last five incidents. Auditors were told the architecture "conforms to the vendor reference". Sequence the migration to a simpler topology without losing the audit story.

    3 min answer reference-modelslanding-zonetailoringaudit
  7. Requirements to Constraints beginner

    A live-sport streaming service is planning for a cricket final. Marketing says "be ready for a big audience". The semi-final peaked at 1.8 million concurrent viewers and climbed from 400000 to 1.8 million in roughly 90 seconds at the first ball. Segments are 4 seconds long. Roughly what does the final demand, and which of those numbers actually constrains the design?

    3 min answer live-streamingpeak-event-readinesscapacity-planningautoscaling
  8. Requirements to Constraints advanced

    A short-video recommendation service was designed when a median session pulled 20 videos and feature computation took 40 ms. Two years later sessions pull 200 videos, the model is larger, and p99 recommendation latency has quietly tripled - yet no single change looks responsible. How do you diagnose this as a constraints problem rather than a code problem?

    2 min answer constraintscapacityrecommendationsbytedance
  9. Requirements to Constraints intermediate Multiple choice

    A video conferencing product grows from 10 million to 300 million daily participants in ten weeks. No feature request changed. Which part of the architecture is under threat first, and why?

    2 min answer constraintscapacityscalingzoom
  10. Requirements to Constraints intermediate

    Groww's brokers and exchanges are only reachable during market hours, settlement files arrive at fixed times, and regulators require an immutable audit record. Which of these is a requirement and which is a constraint, and why does the distinction matter?

    1 min answer constraintsgrowwbrokerageregulation
  11. Separation of Concerns intermediate

    A ride-hailing company moving off its monolith found engineers actively avoiding service calls because they could not see the latency or the failures those calls produced. Lyft's published answer was Envoy, open-sourced in September 2016: a separate process on every host that all service traffic flows through. Which concern was actually separated, what did the separation cost, and when is a shared library the better answer?

    3 min answer lyftenvoysidecarcross-cutting-concern
  12. Separation of Concerns beginner Multiple choice

    A user signup request takes 4 seconds at p99. Tracing shows the handler sends a welcome email through a third-party API and writes to a CRM before returning. What is wrong architecturally?

    2 min answer separation-of-concernsasyncavailabilitycoupling