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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. Distributed Transactions advanced

    A workflow succeeds in one service, then the next service crashes before recording the event. How do transactional outbox, durable queues, retries, idempotent consumers and reconciliation each contribute, and which of them is not optional?

    2 min answer temporaloutboxdurable-executionexactly-once
  2. Distributed Transactions advanced Multiple choice

    An order at extreme e-commerce scale must reserve inventory, charge payment, create the order and notify fulfilment - across four independently deployed services. Which transaction strategy fits?

    2 min answer distributed-transactionssagatwo-phase-commitalibaba
  3. Distributed Transactions advanced

    Placing an order must reserve stock, charge the card and create a shipment across three services. Design it, and justify why not a distributed transaction.

    2 min answer sagatransactionspivotcompensation
  4. DNS advanced

    A globally distributed API experiences a regional networking failure. How should DNS, health checks, traffic steering, connection draining, failover and consistency interact?

    2 min answer flyioanycastdnsfailover
  5. DNS beginner Multiple choice

    At 09:00 a team creates the DNS record for a new regional endpoint. It resolves from their laptops at once, but part of the fleet keeps getting NXDOMAIN until about 09:20 even though the record's TTL is 60 seconds. Why?

    2 min answer dnsnegative-cachingnxdomaincutover
  6. DNS intermediate Multiple choice

    Why is DNS a poor primary mechanism for fast failover, and what should be used instead for a globally distributed service?

    2 min answer dnsfailoveranycastttl
  7. DNS intermediate

    You use DNS with a 60-second TTL for regional failover. During a test, some traffic still hit the failed region 40 minutes later. Explain.

    2 min answer dnsfailoverresilience
  8. DNS advanced

    Your DR plan assumes a 60-second DNS TTL gives 60-second failover. Traffic to the failed region continues for 20 minutes. Explain and design something better.

    2 min answer dnsfailoverttlanycast
  9. Documentation Practice intermediate

    A developer platform's users repeatedly build integrations that break on the platform's next release. What communication failure caused this?

    2 min answer supabaseapi-docscompatibilitycontract
  10. Documentation Practice intermediate

    A platform's documentation is comprehensive and developers still get things wrong. What kind of documentation is missing?

    2 min answer documentationguaranteessemanticsdeveloper-experience
  11. Documentation Practice intermediate Multiple choice

    Four team wikis holding about 1400 pages between them are being consolidated into one documentation site for 300 engineers. Analytics show 43 pages serve over half of all reads. Which sequence do you run?

    3 min answer documentationmigrationredirectsretention
  12. Documentation Practice intermediate

    You have two hours to document a system before handing it over. What do you write, and what do you deliberately leave out?

    2 min answer documentationhandoverinvariantsoperations