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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. Distributed Locking advanced

    Three designs need distributed locks: a nightly report, a per-customer state machine, and a global config reload. For each, is a lock the right answer?

    2 min answer lockingpartitioningidempotencydesign
  2. Distributed Systems advanced

    A 43-second network partition caused GitHub over 24 hours of degraded service in 2018. How does a 43-second event become a day-long incident?

    2 min answer failoversplit-brainconsistencycase-study
  3. Distributed Systems advanced Multiple choice

    A card payment authorisation service runs active-active across two regions. A network partition splits them. Do you keep accepting authorisations, and what breaks either way?

    2 min answer capconsistencypaymentsavailability
  4. Distributed Systems advanced

    A downstream service slows from 50 ms to 3 s. Within two minutes every service in the request path is down, including ones that do not call it. Explain the mechanism and how you would have prevented it.

    2 min answer cascading-failureretriestimeoutsresilience
  5. Distributed Systems intermediate

    An order service must notify inventory, billing, shipping and analytics when an order is placed. Synchronous calls or events? Justify your choice per consumer.

    2 min answer event-drivencouplingavailabilityintegration
  6. Distributed Systems intermediate

    Design an order submission API that is safe when the client cannot tell whether its request succeeded. What exactly do you store, and when?

    2 min answer idempotencyapi-designretries
  7. Distributed Systems intermediate Multiple choice

    You move a user profile service to eventual consistency and support tickets start arriving: users update their name and the old one is still shown. Fix it without abandoning the architecture.

    2 min answer consistencyreplicationuxread-your-writes
  8. Distributed Tracing advanced

    You are introducing distributed tracing across 40 services owned by 12 teams. Plan the adoption.

    2 min answer tracingopentelemetryadoptionsampling
  9. Distributed Transactions advanced

    Placing an order must reserve stock, charge the card and create a shipment across three services. Design it, and justify why not a distributed transaction.

    2 min answer sagatransactionspivotcompensation
  10. DNS advanced

    Your DR plan assumes a 60-second DNS TTL gives 60-second failover. Traffic to the failed region continues for 20 minutes. Explain and design something better.

    2 min answer dnsfailoverttlanycast
  11. Edge Computing advanced

    A team proposes moving personalisation to edge functions to cut latency. When does that work and when does it backfire?

    2 min answer edgelatencystatecaching
  12. Encryption intermediate Multiple choice

    A regulator asks whether customer data is encrypted. The team says yes, disks are encrypted. Is that a sufficient answer?

    2 min answer encryptionthreat-modelcompliance