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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

65 questions in Streaming & Real-Time Data.

  1. Partition Keys & Ordering advanced

    Alibaba reported a peak of 583,000 order creations per second during Singles' Day 2020. Take that as the sizing input for a log-based order-event pipeline with per-buyer ordering. Roughly how many partitions does the order topic need, and which assumption dominates the error?

    2 min answer alibabapartitionscapacitypeak-event-readiness
  2. Partition Keys & Ordering advanced

    One customer generates 60% of your event volume. Their partition's consumer cannot keep up and the rest idle. What are your options?

    2 min answer skewmulti-tenancyscaling
  3. Real-Time Serving Layer advanced

    A contest platform must update leaderboards for millions of participants as scoring events arrive. What is the architecture, and what must not be attempted?

    2 min answer dream11leaderboardfanoutprecomputation
  4. Real-Time Serving Layer advanced

    A feature needs personalised results in under 50 ms for millions of users. What is computed when?

    2 min answer servingprecomputationhybridfreshness
  5. Real-Time Serving Layer advanced

    A flash sale opens at a published time. The precomputed inventory and price data is served from a real-time serving layer whose caches were rebuilt an hour earlier during a deploy. What happens in the first ten seconds after the sale opens?

    3 min answer flash salecold cacherequest collapsingalibaba
  6. Real-Time Serving Layer advanced

    A real-time platform must serve computed state to a low-latency request path. What should the serving layer look like?

    2 min answer serving-layerdecouplingfreshnessavailability
  7. Real-Time Analytical Stores advanced

    A platform needs sub-second analytical queries over a continuously updating dataset. What kind of store, and what are the trade-offs?

    2 min answer zerodhaolapingestionfreshness
  8. Real-Time Analytical Stores advanced

    A platform needs sub-second analytical queries over recent high-volume event data. What store characteristics matter?

    2 min answer realtime-analyticsingestioncardinalityretention
  9. Real-Time Analytical Stores advanced Multiple choice

    A telemetry product must answer arbitrary filtered queries over hundreds of billions of events retained for 15 months, with sub-10-second response for the last 24 hours. Each event has 40 to 200 fields and cardinality is unbounded. Which storage design fits?

    3 min answer datadoghuskycolumnarobject storage
  10. Stateful Stream Processing advanced

    A stateful stream processor's state grows continuously and recovery takes hours. What design changes address this?

    2 min answer statecheckpointingrecoveryttl
  11. Stateful Stream Processing advanced

    A stream processing job has run fine for four months. It now fails with out-of-memory errors every few hours. No code has changed. Diagnose.

    2 min answer streamingstatettlcapacity
  12. Stateful Stream Processing advanced

    A stream processing job has run for four months and now fails with out-of-memory errors every few hours. No code has changed. Diagnose.

    2 min answer streamingstateoperations