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Quiz

179 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 areas179 Architecture Fundamentals5 Distributed Systems26 Data Architecture23 Cloud Architecture19 Networking17 API & Integration Architecture13 Reliability & Resilience9 Observability8 Performance & Capacity Engineering6 Security Architecture16 Cost Architecture & FinOps4 Business Architecture2 Architecture Communication3 Enterprise Architecture2 Legacy Modernization3 AI-Era Architecture3 Software Architecture & Engineering3 Architecture Patterns6 Architecture Decision-Making9 The Architect's Meta-Skills2
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

179 questions.

  1. 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
  2. Enterprise Architecture advanced

    You inherit an estate of roughly 400 applications, no reliable inventory, and a mandate to reduce cost and risk. What do you do in the first ninety days?

    2 min answer portfoliorationalisationgovernancemodernization
  3. ETL & ELT intermediate

    A nightly pipeline failed halfway and the retry produced duplicate rows. Walk me through fixing this properly.

    2 min answer idempotencypipelinesbackfillcorrectness
  4. Event-Driven Integration advanced

    An order service publishes events consumed by six teams. Every consumer immediately calls back for order details. What is wrong and what do you change?

    2 min answer eventspayload-designcouplingversioning
  5. Event Sourcing advanced

    A team wants event sourcing for a new order service, citing audit requirements. What do you recommend?

    2 min answer event-sourcingauditdecision-making
  6. Event Streaming advanced Multiple choice

    Consumer lag on a Kafka topic grows during peak and does not recover overnight. You add consumers and nothing improves. Why?

    2 min answer kafkapartitionsconsumer-groupslag
  7. Presenting to Executives advanced

    You must get approval for a costly architectural change from a board that includes the CFO, the CISO and two engineering leads who disagree with your approach. How do you prepare?

    3 min answer communicationstakeholderstradeoffsnegotiation
  8. Failover advanced

    The business asks for multi-region active-active. Walk through the decision and what it actually requires.

    2 min answer multi-regionfailoverconsistencycost
  9. Failure Modes advanced

    One instance in a fleet of fifty is returning correct responses very slowly. Health checks pass and it stays in rotation. How do you detect and handle this?

    2 min answer grey-failurehealth-checksdetectionmitigation
  10. FinOps Practice advanced

    Cloud spend has grown 60% in a year while revenue grew 15%. The CFO wants a 30% reduction. How do you respond?

    3 min answer finopscostunit-economicsgovernance
  11. Firewalls & Security Groups advanced

    Security requires default-deny egress across the estate. Engineering says it will cause constant outages. How do you deliver it?

    2 min answer egresszero-trustflow-logssecurity
  12. Fitness Functions advanced

    Architecture decisions in your organisation are either ignored or bottlenecked in a review board. Design something better.

    3 min answer governanceadrfitness-functionsprinciples