Quiz

2667 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 areas2667 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 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

60 questions in Data Architecture.

Quiz

A search platform receives continuous document updates while users expect newly published content to appear quickly. How should indexing pipelines, replicas, refresh intervals, cache invalidation and query serving be separated?

A source-code platform must make code across millions of repositories searchable, where repositories differ enormously in size and activity. Which indexing decisions dominate, and what makes this different from indexing documents?

Prices change continuously based on demand and dates. Search must filter and sort by price over millions of listings. How?

A chat platform stores billions of messages in a wide-column database and hits severe tail-latency problems on hot partitions during large-community activity. Analyse why the storage choice is right but the partitioning is wrong, and what the fix looks like.

A professional network computes "people you may know" from the connection graph. Some accounts have hundreds of thousands of connections. What breaks?

A collaboration product is sharding its database. Options are hash of message ID, hash of user ID, or workspace ID. Which and why?

A messaging platform stores messages partitioned by channel identifier. Some channels are enormously more active than others. Fix the partitioning.

A multi-tenant SaaS platform runs thousands of tenants on a shared relational database, but a handful of tenants now hold most of the data. Should it use shared tables, tenant partitioning, dedicated databases, sharding or a hybrid?

A workspace product stores every document as a tree of small "block" rows in one enormous table. Growth makes the table unmanageable. Design the sharding strategy - and identify the choice that is effectively irreversible.

Your geospatial data is partitioned by city. One city generates 40% of all traffic. What are your options?

A delivery platform migrated parts of its data estate to CockroachDB and other parts to Aurora. What evidence distinguishes workloads that justify a distributed SQL database from those better served by a single-writer managed Postgres?

A trading platform is considering a relational database, a key-value store, a time-series store and a search engine. What justifies each, and what is the cost of running four?