Portfolio ↗

Quiz

2868 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 areas2868 Architecture Fundamentals91 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture87 Reliability & Resilience99 Observability92 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture95 Cost Architecture & FinOps92 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication102 Enterprise Architecture100 Legacy Modernization92 AI-Era Architecture96 Software Architecture & Engineering93 Architecture Patterns94 Architecture Decision-Making101 The Architect's Meta-Skills102 Delivery & Release Engineering103 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience92 Testing & Quality Architecture102 Data Platform Architecture98 Streaming & Real-Time Data103 Data Governance & Semantics91 Frontend & Experience Architecture101 Edge, Mobile & IoT98 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture99 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk98
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

92 questions in Platform Engineering.

  1. Service Mesh Operations advanced Multiple choice

    A team proposes adopting a service mesh for twelve services in one language. Do you support it?

    2 min answer service-meshcomplexitydecision
  2. Service Mesh Operations advanced

    An Envoy-based mesh carries 600 services across 3000 pods. At 09:00 the mesh control plane is lost entirely and cannot be restored for 90 minutes. No application or node has failed. What happens over those 90 minutes, what sets the real deadline, and what would make the mesh ride it out?

    3 min answer service-meshenvoyxdsfail-static
  3. Service Mesh Operations intermediate

    Lyft built Envoy and open-sourced it in 2016 to move networking concerns out of application services. What problem did that actually solve, and for which organisations does a service mesh fail to pay for itself?

    2 min answer lyftenvoyservice meshpolyglot
  4. Service Mesh Operations advanced

    You must move the sidecar proxies of 500 services and 2400 pods from mesh version n-2 to n. The control plane supports one version of skew with its data plane and each proxy upgrade is a pod restart. Several services hold gRPC streams open for hours. Plan the migration so that no service sees an unplanned reset and you can stop at any point.

    3 min answer service meshenvoyupgradeversion skew
  5. Service Templates intermediate

    A platform provides service templates and teams' services diverge from them within months. What should the template strategy be?

    2 min answer templatesdriftupdatesownership
  6. Service Templates advanced

    A platform stops generating 400 lines of observability and deployment boilerplate into each new service repository and ships it instead as a versioned library plus a shared base chart that services depend on. Two hundred services will adopt it. What is gained and what is paid and when does the bill arrive?

    3 min answer service templatesshared libraryblast radiusversioning
  7. Service Templates advanced

    A platform's service template produced fifty services, and it has since improved substantially. How should improvements reach the existing services?

    2 min answer postmantemplatesdriftpropagation
  8. Service Templates advanced

    A vulnerability is found in the base image used by 200 services generated from your service template. How do they all get fixed?

    2 min answer platformsupply-chainfleet