Quiz

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

84 questions in Architecture Patterns.

Quiz

A card platform integrates with a network whose data model and semantics differ fundamentally from its own. Where should the translation live and what discipline does it require?

A new service must integrate with a legacy system whose data model is entangled and poorly named. What does an anti-corruption layer actually do, and how do you know it is working?

A platform integrates retailer systems with inconsistent models. What does an anti-corruption layer prevent, and where does it belong?

A team integrates a vendor CRM whose customer model contradicts theirs. Six months later vendor field names and status codes appear throughout the codebase. What was missing and what is the fix now?

A developer platform's API gateway has accumulated business logic and become a bottleneck for every team. What should be moved out, and what belongs there?

A public API is being overwhelmed by a handful of clients. Where should rate limiting live, which algorithm, and how should limits differ across users, tenants, endpoints and infrastructure?

An API gateway has accumulated authentication, rate limiting, routing, response transformation, request validation and some business logic. Which of these belong there?

A design review proposes a system using service discovery, a message broker, CQRS, event sourcing and distributed locks for a workload expected to have a few thousand users. What would you simplify, and how would you justify it?

Design a URL shortener handling 100 million new links per month and 10 billion redirects. Where is the real difficulty?

Orders must trigger inventory reservation, a confirmation email, an analytics record and a fraud check. Queue, topic, or both — and what breaks if you choose wrong?

Prime Video reported a 90% cost cut by consolidating a serverless distributed service into one process. Does that mean microservices were the wrong choice, and what is the actual decision rule?