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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. Decommissioning advanced Multiple choice

    A replaced system was made read-only for 30 days. No complaints came in and it was switched off, with its data exported to an archive. Three weeks later the annual regulatory extract fails, because the job read directly from the retired database. Which design decision made this possible?

    3 min answer decommissioningbatchregulatoryobservability
  2. Degradation Modes advanced

    A crypto aggregator's upstream exchange feeds become unreliable during extreme market volatility - the moment users most need them. How should stale data, provider failover, breakers, caching and user-facing warnings interact?

    2 min answer coinswitchmarket-datastalenessfailover
  3. Degradation Modes advanced

    An e-commerce platform designs explicit degradation modes for extreme demand events. What must be true of the mode ladder for it to work on the day?

    2 min answer degradationload-sheddingflash-salerehearsal
  4. Degradation Modes advanced

    Define three degradation modes for a real-time marketplace. What triggers each, what stops working, and how does the system return to normal?

    2 min answer degradation-modesuberprioritisationload-shedding
  5. Degradation Modes intermediate

    Ticketmaster stated that the November 2022 Eras Tour onsale drove 3.5 billion total system requests, about 4x its previous peak, attributing much of it to bot traffic and users without invite codes. At 4x peak with inventory far below demand, you can queue, fail fast, or degrade. What does each buy, and what does it cost?

    3 min answer ticketmasterload sheddingqueueingflash sale
  6. Delivery & Release Engineering intermediate

    A platform's pipeline is reliable but slow, and developers batch changes to avoid it. What is the real cost, and what should be measured?

    2 min answer pipelinefeedbackbatchingmetrics
  7. Delivery & Release Engineering beginner

    Your pipeline promotes one container digest from staging to production, and the team says production therefore runs exactly what was tested. The deployment chart values, the feature-flag defaults and the migration set are each resolved fresh at deploy time. Why is the promotion claim false, and what is the smallest change that makes it true?

    3 min answer promotionrelease-unitconfigurationfeature-flags
  8. Delivery & Release Engineering intermediate Multiple choice

    Your pipeline takes 45 minutes and fails randomly twice a week. Which do you fix first and why?

    2 min answer pipelineflakinesstrustfeedback
  9. Delivery vs Maintainability intermediate

    A quick-commerce grocery operator running dark stores needs substitution handling for out-of-stock items. Option A is a rule table inside the existing order service: three weeks and it will need rework. Option B is a separate availability-and-substitution service with its own store: eleven weeks. The business does 45000 orders a day, cancels about 6% of them for stock reasons, expects the feature to recover roughly a third of those, and earns about 1.10 dollars of contribution per order. Roughly what is the cost of delay, and what rework budget does it justify?

    3 min answer cost-of-delaytechnical-debtsubstitutionsestimation
  10. Delivery vs Maintainability beginner Multiple choice

    A team has three weeks to launch and has agreed that exactly one corner will be cut. Four candidates are on the table. Which shortcut is the safe one to take?

    3 min answer technical-debtidentifiersdata-modelreversibility
  11. Delivery vs Maintainability intermediate

    A team must ship a major capability quickly and the design that ships fastest is not the one that is easiest to maintain. How should the trade-off be made?

    1 min answer deliverymaintainabilityreversibilitydebt
  12. Delivery vs Maintainability advanced

    How would you make the case for a two-sprint refactor to a product manager under delivery pressure?

    2 min answer technical-debtcommunicationevidencecapability