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Quiz

2707 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 areas2707 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture78 Reliability & Resilience88 Observability81 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture95 Cost Architecture & FinOps92 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication91 Enterprise Architecture91 Legacy Modernization92 AI-Era Architecture96 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 Architecture98 Streaming & Real-Time Data93 Data Governance & Semantics91 Frontend & Experience Architecture91 Edge, Mobile & IoT88 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture90 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk98
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

4 questions in Architecture Principles.

  1. Architecture Principles intermediate

    A commerce platform adopts the principle "every service must survive the failure of any single dependency". A team building an internal analytics dashboard requests an exemption. What does holding the line cost, and what does granting the exemption cost?

    2 min answer principlesexemptionsresilienceshopify
  2. Architecture Principles intermediate

    An organisation's stated principle is "do not build what you can buy". In review it is used to reject an in-house rate limiter for the public API. The vendor option meets every functional need and adds a 40 ms round trip to a request path with a 120 ms p99 budget, and it cannot express the per-tenant burst rules the product sells. The principle is not withdrawn. What did the principle buy the organisation, and what is it now costing?

    3 min answer architecture-principlesbuild-vs-buygovernancelatency-budget
  3. Architecture Principles advanced

    Two teams write to the same set of database tables from two separately deployed services. List the problems this creates and describe how you would evolve out of it.

    3 min answer couplingdata-ownershipprinciplesmigration
  4. Architecture Principles intermediate

    You are asked to produce a technology radar for a 200-engineer organisation with no current standards. How do you build the first one?

    2 min answer radargovernancestandardsconsolidation