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

77 questions in Cloud Architecture.

Quiz

A live-streaming platform expects viewer count to increase tenfold within minutes when a major event begins. Its services autoscale on CPU. Predict what happens and what the design should be instead.

A service autoscales on CPU. During incidents it never scales out, even as latency triples. Why, and what would you scale on instead?

A traffic ramp after a quiet period saturates a managed network component that scales automatically but not fast enough. Degradation cascades. Analyse.

A workload has extreme bursts lasting a few minutes, triggered by scheduled real-world events. Should the architecture use autoscaling, pre-provisioned capacity, queues, caching, admission control, serverless, or a combination?

Your capacity plan relies on autoscaling to handle traffic spikes. Why might that fail exactly when needed?

A marketplace runs across three availability zones in one region. What actually happens when one zone fails, and which common design choices turn a survivable zone failure into an outage?

One availability zone becomes unavailable. Walk through what happens to a typical three-tier application and what you would have changed.

What is cell-based architecture, what does it actually buy, and how do you decide cell size and routing?

A backup and data-protection platform stores enormous volumes across many customers. What determines whether the architecture is actually a recovery system rather than a storage system?

A company discovers during an incident that five separate backup and replication mechanisms all failed to produce a usable recovery point. What class of failure is this, and what practice prevents it?

A ransomware exercise asks: can you restore the production database to a point before the encryption? What must be true?

A team says "backups run nightly and are retained for 30 days". You have one hour to assess whether they could actually recover. What do you check?