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

80 questions in Distributed Systems.

Quiz

Design the system that matches a rider request to a nearby driver. What are the hard parts?

DynamoDB has evolved through adaptive capacity, on-demand mode and global tables. Which failure mode did each address, and what does the sequence teach about designing partitioned systems?

Showing which users are currently online seems trivial and is one of the most expensive features in a chat product. Explain.

A stay booking spans payment authorisation, calendar reservation, host notification and a guest confirmation email. A distributed ACID transaction is not available. How do you order the steps and what do you do when a compensation fails?

A workflow succeeds in one service, then the next service crashes before recording the event. How do transactional outbox, durable queues, retries, idempotent consumers and reconciliation each contribute, and which of them is not optional?

An order at extreme e-commerce scale must reserve inventory, charge payment, create the order and notify fulfilment - across four independently deployed services. Which transaction strategy fits?

Placing an order must reserve stock, charge the card and create a shipment across three services. Design it, and justify why not a distributed transaction.

A ride-hailing platform must process billions of location and trip events per day, with per-trip ordering. Design the partitioning, consumer scaling and failure handling.

Consumer lag on a Kafka topic grows during peak and does not recover overnight. You add consumers and nothing improves. Why?

Design the event ingestion path for a recommendation platform receiving billions of interaction events daily, where the same events must feed real-time personalisation and offline model training. How should the pipeline be structured?

A downstream service slows from 50 ms to 3 s. Within two minutes every service in the request path is down, including ones that do not call it. Explain the mechanism.

A ride-hailing platform has a severe driver shortage in one region. Demand estimation, pricing, dispatch, queueing and driver incentives all interact. How do you prevent an unstable feedback loop?