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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. GraphQL advanced

    A team is about to launch a public GraphQL API. What must be in place before it goes live?

    2 min answer graphqlsecurityperformancecaching
  2. HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 & HTTP/3 advanced

    You migrate a mobile API to HTTP/2 and p99 latency gets worse for users on cellular networks, while p50 improves. Explain and decide what to do.

    1 min answer http2http3quichead-of-line
  3. Idempotency Keys advanced

    A payments API must guarantee that a network retry never charges a customer twice. Design the mechanism end to end.

    2 min answer idempotencypaymentsretriesexactly-once
  4. Incident Management advanced

    Incidents at your company are chaotic: unclear ownership, no communication, and postmortems that produce nothing. Design the improvement.

    2 min answer incidentrolesseveritypostmortem
  5. Security Incident Response advanced

    Anomalous access to a customer database is detected. Walk me through the first day, and say what determines whether you can answer the regulator.

    2 min answer incident-responsebreachforensicsnotification
  6. Indexing intermediate

    A table has 14 indexes and writes have become slow. How do you decide which to remove?

    2 min answer indexingwrite-performancereview
  7. Infrastructure as Code intermediate

    Half your production changes are made through the console during incidents. The IaC repository no longer matches reality. What do you do?

    2 min answer iacdriftgovernancebreak-glass
  8. Kubernetes advanced

    One service restarts unpredictably; another is slow with low CPU. Both run on Kubernetes. What are you looking at?

    2 min answer kuberneteslimitsthrottlingoom
  9. Landing Zones advanced

    An organisation is starting cloud adoption. Three teams want to deploy next month. What must exist first, and what can wait?

    2 min answer landing-zonegovernancesequencing
  10. Leader Election advanced

    A nightly job occasionally runs twice, producing duplicate charges. The team proposes a distributed lock. What do you say?

    2 min answer leader-electionlockingidempotencyfencing
  11. Leader Election advanced

    Your cluster fails over spuriously under load, but a real leader failure takes 45 seconds to detect. How do you resolve the tension?

    2 min answer leader-electionfailoverdetectiontuning
  12. Legacy Assessment advanced

    A twenty-year-old core system supports most of the business. It is on unsupported technology, three people understand it, and the last replacement attempt was abandoned after two years. Design the programme.

    3 min answer legacystranglerriskbusiness-case