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2627 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 areas2627 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture77 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture78 Reliability & Resilience88 Observability81 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture85 Cost Architecture & FinOps82 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication91 Enterprise Architecture91 Legacy Modernization82 AI-Era Architecture86 Software Architecture & Engineering84 Architecture Patterns84 Architecture Decision-Making91 The Architect's Meta-Skills92 Delivery & Release Engineering93 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience92 Testing & Quality Architecture90 Data Platform Architecture88 Streaming & Real-Time Data93 Data Governance & Semantics81 Frontend & Experience Architecture91 Edge, Mobile & IoT88 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture90 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk88
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

81 questions in Architecture Fundamentals.

  1. Abstraction & Encapsulation advanced

    A metadata-driven API layer generates queries over a customer's database. A customer writes a deeply nested query that produces a catastrophic join. Is that an abstraction failure, and what should the design do about it?

    2 min answer abstractionhasuragraphqlleaky-abstraction
  2. Abstraction & Encapsulation advanced

    A team proposes wrapping every cloud provider SDK behind an internal abstraction so the company could migrate providers later. Evaluate the proposal.

    2 min answer abstractionportabilitytradeoffsdropbox
  3. Abstraction & Encapsulation advanced

    Design the abstraction boundary for a "vote" on a large discussion platform where a handful of threads receive an enormous share of all votes. What should the interface promise, what must it hide, and what must it refuse to hide?

    2 min answer abstractionencapsulationhot-keysreddit
  4. Architectural Drivers advanced Multiple choice

    A large ERP programme was designed around performance and integration. Eighteen months in it fails audit - not because it is slow or badly integrated, but because it cannot demonstrate who changed a financial record and why. Which architectural driver was missed, and why is this structural rather than a missing feature?

    1 min answer driversauditabilityerpsap
  5. Architectural Drivers advanced

    A system meets every SLO but the business is unhappy because feature delivery has slowed to a crawl. What is being measured wrongly, and when is reducing distribution the right scalability investment?

    2 min answer doracoordination-costdeliverydrivers
  6. Architectural Drivers intermediate

    You are designing a payments API. Peak volume is modest - a few thousand requests per second. What is the dominant architectural driver and what does it force into the design?

    2 min answer driversidempotencypaymentsstripe
  7. Architectural Drivers intermediate

    Zepto's product promise is a ten-minute grocery delivery. An architect is handed a backlog of forty requirements. Which one is the architectural driver, and what does that classification actually change?

    2 min answer driverszeptolatencyquick-commerce
  8. Architecture Documentation intermediate

    A database platform team is asked why a decade-old partitioning scheme was chosen. Nobody remembers, the original architects have left, and the only artefact is a diagram with no rationale. What failed here, and what document would have prevented it?

    2 min answer documentationadrrationaleoracle
  9. Architecture Documentation intermediate

    A developer-tools company has a fifty-page architecture document that nobody reads and a set of diagrams that are eight months stale. What should be written instead?

    1 min answer documentationpostmanadrc4
  10. Architecture Documentation intermediate

    You are leaving a project in two days and have two hours to document the system. What do you write and what do you deliberately leave out?

    2 min answer documentationadrhandovergoogle
  11. Architecture Documentation intermediate

    Your team maintains a 90-page architecture document that is always out of date and nobody reads. What should replace it?

    1 min answer documentationcommunicationadr
  12. Architecture Fundamentals intermediate

    A team shows you a design with eight services. Without knowing the domain, what questions tell you whether the boundaries are right?

    2 min answer couplingcohesionboundariesreview