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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

81 questions in Architecture Fundamentals.

  1. Separation of Concerns advanced

    An AI inference platform handles authentication, quota accounting, prompt assembly, safety filtering, model invocation, token counting, billing emission and response streaming in one request handler. Latency is currently fine. Argue for or against separating these concerns, and identify which separations pay for themselves first.

    2 min answer separation-of-concernsinferenceanthropicscenario
  2. Separation of Concerns advanced

    An issue tracker with local-first behaviour keeps a client-side store, a sync engine, and a server. A product manager asks for a new field on an issue. In a well-separated design, how many places should change, and what does the answer tell you?

    1 min answer separation-of-concernslinearlocal-firstsync
  3. Technical Constraints advanced

    A quick-commerce platform's architecture is bounded by things that are not software: store leases, courier supply, road conditions, and the physical time to pick items off a shelf. How should such constraints enter the design?

    2 min answer constraintszeptophysical-worldquick-commerce
  4. Technical Constraints advanced

    A retailer's website must show whether an item is available in a nearby store. Store systems are occasionally offline and physical counts drift from recorded counts. How should availability be modelled?

    2 min answer constraintsinventoryconsistencywalmart
  5. Technical Constraints advanced

    An observability platform lets customers attach arbitrary tags to metrics. One customer adds a tag containing a request identifier. What would you change about the system's constraints, and why is "tell the customer not to do that" an insufficient answer?

    2 min answer constraintscardinalityobservabilitydatadog
  6. Trade-off Fundamentals advanced

    A file-sync company moves the bulk of its storage from a public cloud onto its own infrastructure. What was gained, what was sacrificed, and under what conditions would this trade-off be wrong for a different company?

    2 min answer tradeoffscostinfrastructuredropbox
  7. Trade-off Fundamentals intermediate

    A user-generated storytelling platform is 98% reads with an extremely skewed popularity distribution. The team debates caching, read replicas and denormalisation. How should the trade-off be framed?

    2 min answer tradeoffspratilipiread-heavyskew
  8. Trade-off Fundamentals intermediate

    An architecture review proposes multi-region active-active, event sourcing, CQRS and a service mesh for an internal tool with 500 users. Write the simpler architecture, and state the specific facts that would justify each rejected pattern later.

    2 min answer over-engineeringyagnireversibilitydrivers
  9. Trade-off Fundamentals advanced Multiple choice

    An organisation decomposed into thousands of microservices during hypergrowth and later consolidated into coarser domain groupings. Was the original decision wrong?

    2 min answer tradeoffsmicroservicesuberevolution