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Quiz

2777 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 areas2777 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture87 Reliability & Resilience99 Observability92 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture95 Cost Architecture & FinOps92 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication91 Enterprise Architecture100 Legacy Modernization92 AI-Era Architecture96 Software Architecture & Engineering93 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 Architecture99 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk98
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

2777 questions.

  1. Debugging Distributed Systems advanced

    A streaming consumer's lag is growing steadily while workers show low CPU and no errors. What are the candidate causes and how do you distinguish them?

    2 min answer confluentconsumer-lagdiagnosisbackpressure
  2. Architecture Decision-Making advanced

    An architecture review reveals a proposed system requiring service discovery, several databases, distributed locks, a message broker, CQRS, event sourcing, a container orchestrator and a service mesh - for a workload expected to have a few thousand users. What would you simplify and how would you justify it?

    2 min answer zeptoover-engineeringsimplicityjustification
  3. Architecture Decision-Making advanced

    An organisation makes architectural decisions slowly and revisits them repeatedly. What structural changes improve decision quality and speed together?

    2 min answer decision-makingdecision-rightsreversibilityevidence
  4. 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
  5. 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
  6. 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
  7. 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
  8. 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
  9. 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
  10. Decision Practice intermediate

    A large organisation wants consistent architectural decision practice across many teams. What should be standardised and what should not?

    2 min answer decision-practicestandardisationautonomygovernance
  11. Decision Practice advanced

    Three years of architectural decisions live in a wiki, in chat threads and in two shared documents. The team agrees to move decision records into the repository beside the code without a 300-page backfill. Give the sequence, and name the point of no return.

    3 min answer decision-recordsmigrationdocumentationgovernance
  12. Decision Practice intermediate

    You join a team with no decision records. Significant choices are made in chat and nobody can explain why the system is shaped as it is. How do you introduce ADRs without it becoming process overhead?

    2 min answer adrdocumentationpracticeadoption