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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

56 questions in Architecture Patterns.

  1. Competing Consumers advanced

    At 14:02 a consumer group of twelve workers is draining a partitioned order-events topic at 9,000 messages a second. By 14:07 throughput is zero while every worker is running and its health check passes, and queue depth is climbing. At 14:12 throughput returns for forty seconds and then stops again. The pattern repeats. What failed, and which design decision allowed it?

    3 min answer kafkaconsumer grouprebalancepoison message
  2. CQRS advanced

    A classifieds and auction marketplace at eBay's listing volume runs CQRS - writes to Postgres and a search-shaped read model built from an append-only change log that now holds 1.2 billion events across 24 partitions. A projection bug has been live for nine days. Work out roughly how long a full rebuild takes and say what that number decides.

    3 min answer cqrsprojectionrebuildread model
  3. CQRS advanced

    A live platform's read requirements differ sharply from its write model. What evidence justifies CQRS, and what obligation does it create?

    2 min answer cqrsread-modelprojectionsrebuild
  4. CQRS advanced

    A team proposes CQRS with event sourcing for a new internal admin tool because the patterns are considered scalable. Evaluate.

    3 min answer cqrsevent-sourcingover-engineeringtradeoffs
  5. CQRS advanced

    A team proposes CQRS with event sourcing for a new service. How do you evaluate the proposal?

    2 min answer cqrsevent-sourcingcomplexitydecision
  6. Event-Driven Architecture advanced

    A platform adopts event-driven architecture broadly and finds debugging and reasoning much harder. When is event-driven the wrong choice?

    2 min answer event-drivencouplingdebuggingobligations
  7. Event-Driven Architecture advanced

    A team proposes routing every internal workflow through an event-streaming platform because it is scalable and decoupled. What questions do you ask and when is a simpler mechanism correct?

    3 min answer event-drivenkafkaover-engineeringtradeoffs
  8. Event-Driven Architecture advanced

    Review this design. Every service publishes one event type per aggregate - OrderChanged carries the whole order document plus a changeType string. Eleven consumers subscribe and each begins with a switch on changeType, ignoring types it does not care about. What would you remove, what would you change, and what would you leave alone?

    3 min answer event-drivenevent granularitycouplingschema
  9. Event Sourcing advanced

    A ledger service rebuilds its balance projection from the event log into a new store. The rebuilt balances differ from the live ones for about 0.3% of accounts, all of them accounts with activity during two specific weeks last year. The event log has not been modified. What went wrong, and which design decision allowed it?

    3 min answer event sourcingreplaydeterminismprojections
  10. Event Sourcing advanced

    A platform considers event sourcing for auditability. What is the permanent cost teams underestimate, and what is the cheaper alternative?

    2 min answer event-sourcingauditschema-evolutionalternatives
  11. Event Sourcing advanced

    A team proposes event sourcing for a customer preferences service. What questions do you ask?

    2 min answer event-sourcingcomplexitydecision
  12. Event Sourcing advanced

    Design the data model for recording money movement in a marketplace. What properties are non-negotiable?

    2 min answer paymentsledgerimmutabilitycorrectness