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Quiz

2827 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 areas2827 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 Communication91 Enterprise Architecture100 Legacy Modernization92 AI-Era Architecture96 Software Architecture & Engineering93 Architecture Patterns84 Architecture Decision-Making101 The Architect's Meta-Skills92 Delivery & Release Engineering103 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience92 Testing & Quality Architecture102 Data Platform Architecture98 Streaming & Real-Time Data93 Data Governance & Semantics91 Frontend & Experience Architecture101 Edge, Mobile & IoT98 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture99 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk98
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

2827 questions.

  1. Enterprise Integration advanced Multiple choice

    An ecosystem of many business lines needs to share data and events. Should integration be point-to-point, through a central hub, or event-driven? What decides it?

    2 min answer integrationhubeventscoupling
  2. Enterprise Integration advanced

    An estate has 140 point-to-point integrations between 20 systems. What is the problem and what would you do?

    2 min answer integrationtopologycanonical-modelevents
  3. Enterprise Integration advanced

    An estate has 34 systems, 210 running interfaces, and a proposal to introduce a canonical hub. Before deciding, estimate the annual engineering cost of the current integration surface and how it changes when one system's schema is revised. Which number should decide the proposal?

    3 min answer integrationcanonical-modelestimationchange-amplification
  4. Enterprise Integration advanced

    In 2017 The New York Times described replacing a web of API and feed integrations with a single ordered Kafka log - the Monolog - holding every published asset as the source of truth, with back-end systems consuming from it. What forced that change, what did it cost, and where would copying it be a mistake?

    3 min answer new york timeskafkalog-as-source-of-truthintegration
  5. Environment Parity intermediate

    A change passes every test in staging and fails immediately in production. Staging is a faithful copy of the topology. What are the most likely causes, and what would you change?

    2 min answer environmentsparitytesting
  6. Environment Parity advanced

    A platform has already been through the failure Fastly published in 2021 - a defect shipped on 12 May that a customer's valid configuration armed on 8 June - and has since implemented per-point-of-presence staged activation of customer configurations plus grammar-based fuzzing of the configuration surface. Six months later the same class recurs in a different subsystem. Which gap did that action list never close?

    3 min answer fastlyenvironment-paritylatent-defectcontinuous-verification
  7. Environment Parity intermediate

    A team spends a quarter making staging match production: same instance types, same data volume, same topology, same configuration management. Six months later, escapes to production are down by much less than expected. What did parity actually buy, and what did it not?

    3 min answer environment paritystagingtestingcost
  8. Environment Parity advanced

    On 14 March 2023 Reddit upgraded a Kubernetes cluster from 1.23 to 1.24 after the same upgrade had already succeeded elsewhere, and was down for 314 minutes. The upgrade removed a node label that a hand-configured Calico route reflector selected on. Which parity assumption failed?

    2 min answer redditkubernetesparityconfiguration-drift
  9. Environment Parity intermediate

    Which dimensions of environment parity actually matter, and which are safe to differ?

    1 min answer parityenvironmentsconfigurationdeployment
  10. Environment Strategy intermediate

    An organisation has development, integration, staging, pre-production and production environments, and bugs still reach production. What should change?

    2 min answer freshworksenvironmentsparitytesting-in-production
  11. Environment Strategy intermediate

    An organisation maintains many long-lived environments and they have all drifted from production. What environment strategy works?

    2 min answer environmentsdriftephemeralparity
  12. Environment Strategy intermediate

    Six teams share one integration test environment. Bookings are made a week ahead and releases slip when someone overruns. How do you fix it?

    1 min answer environmentsdeliverytestingqueues