Portfolio ↗

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

93 questions in Business Architecture.

  1. Build vs Buy advanced

    A B2B commerce platform must decide whether to build its own logistics network or partner. What should drive the decision beyond cost?

    2 min answer udaandelhiverybuild-vs-buydifferentiation
  2. Build vs Buy advanced Multiple choice

    A platform must decide whether to build its own routing and dispatch optimisation or buy a commercial service. What decides it?

    2 min answer build-vs-buydifferentiationcapabilitydependency
  3. Build vs Buy intermediate

    How do you decide whether to build or buy a capability, and what makes the decision reversible?

    2 min answer build-vs-buydifferentiationexit-costtco
  4. Build vs Buy intermediate

    In February 2022 Akamai announced it would acquire Linode for about $900 million and closed the deal in March 2022 at a purchase price of $898.8 million, adding an infrastructure-as-a-service business to a company that already ran one of the largest edge delivery networks. Akamai had the network, the capital and the engineers to build compute. What made buying the right call, and where would copying this be a mistake?

    3 min answer akamailinodebuild-vs-buyacquisition
  5. Build vs Buy intermediate

    What evidence should drive a build-versus-buy decision, and which arguments on each side are usually made badly?

    2 min answer build-vs-buydifferentiationtcovendor
  6. Business Architecture advanced

    A company operates marketplaces, payments, logistics and cloud services as one ecosystem. What does business architecture contribute that technical architecture does not?

    2 min answer business-architecturecapabilitiesecosystemboundaries
  7. Business Architecture intermediate

    A startup asks you to architect their product "to handle millions of users". They currently have none. What do you actually build?

    2 min answer time-to-marketpragmatismconstraintsproduct
  8. Business Architecture advanced

    Since 2023 Oracle has sold Java SE through a single Universal Subscription priced per employee rather than per processor or per named user. A 12,000-employee group has Oracle JDK builds on 40 servers and roughly 900 laptops and plans to cut that footprint. What changed about their options, and where would copying the obvious response be a mistake?

    3 min answer oraclejavalicensingvendor metrics
  9. Business Architecture advanced

    Southwest cancelled about 16,700 flights in December 2022 when crew scheduling could not recover from a storm, after years of deferred modernisation. How do you make that argument before the failure rather than after?

    3 min answer technical-debtriskmodernizationcase-study
  10. Business Capabilities advanced

    A retailer validates and stores a customer delivery address in three places: checkout, the logistics planner, and support tooling. Each implementation is defensible on its own terms and each team resists change. About 3% of orders fail first-time delivery for address-quality reasons. Walk me through how you would approach this.

    3 min answer capabilitiesownershipmaster databoundaries
  11. Business Capabilities intermediate

    A travel platform's teams describe their work as "search", "book", "pay", "support". Are these capabilities or processes, and why does the distinction matter architecturally?

    2 min answer capabilitiesprocessesstabilityboundaries
  12. Business Capabilities advanced

    How can a business-model choice create a technical constraint that nobody funds, and how should an architect surface that before it becomes an outage?

    3 min answer southwestbusiness-modeltechnical-debtcapability-mapping