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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. Deployment Diagrams intermediate Multiple choice

    An auditor asks what happens to your service if a single availability zone fails. Which diagram answers the question directly?

    3 min answer deploymentavailability zonesquorumresilience
  2. Deployment Diagrams intermediate

    What does a deployment diagram communicate that a container diagram cannot, and what is most often missing from it?

    2 min answer deployment-diagramtopologyfailure-domainscloudflare
  3. Deployment Diagrams intermediate Multiple choice

    What does a deployment diagram show that a container diagram cannot?

    2 min answer deploymentfailure-domainsredundancyblast-radius
  4. Deployment Diagrams intermediate

    Your deployment diagram shows three availability zones with every service replicated into each and a mesh spreading calls evenly across zones. Finance asks why network charges are $14k of a $90k monthly cloud bill. Estimate the cross-zone traffic implied by that number and say what you would annotate on the diagram.

    3 min answer deployment-diagramcross-zonecostannotation
  5. Deployment Gates intermediate

    A pipeline has accumulated a dozen approval gates and lead time has doubled. Which gates are worth keeping?

    2 min answer browserstackgateslead-timeautomation
  6. Deployment Gates intermediate

    An enterprise's deployment gates have accumulated until releases take weeks. Which gates should remain automated, which manual, and which removed?

    2 min answer gatesautomationapprovalsrisk
  7. Deployment Gates intermediate

    During an outage, an engineer wants to bypass the pipeline and patch production directly. It would save 25 minutes. What is your position?

    2 min answer incidentgovernancecontrols
  8. Deployment Gates advanced

    On 8 March 2023 a systemd security update was applied automatically across a large fraction of Datadog's virtual machines. The restart of systemd-networkd removed routes managed by the container network plugin and took roughly half the Kubernetes nodes offline across five regions. The deployment pipeline was not involved. What failed, and which design decision allowed it?

    3 min answer datadogchange-managementstaged-rolloutunattended-updates
  9. Deployment Gates advanced Multiple choice

    Your edge platform propagates configuration changes to every location within seconds. Is that a strength or a risk?

    2 min answer cloudflareconfigurationblast-radiusstaging
  10. Deployment Strategies advanced

    A deployment reaches seven of eight servers. The eighth runs old code that a reused flag activates. Losses accumulate for 45 minutes. What are the findings?

    2 min answer knight-capitaldeploymentflagsverification
  11. Deployment Strategies advanced Multiple choice

    A food-delivery platform in the mould of Zomato rolls out a pricing change in nine steps over 90 minutes with a 10-minute bake between steps. Error rate, latency and saturation stay flat the whole time. The defect is a wrong rounding rule that under-charges some orders, and it surfaces the next morning when finance reconciliation runs. Which change makes this class of rollout safe?

    3 min answer zomatoprogressive-deliveryinvariantsbake-time
  12. Deployment Strategies advanced

    A platform must deploy a service holding millions of long-lived connections. Which deployment strategy applies, and what capability makes it work?

    1 min answer deploymentstatefuldrainingresumption