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Quiz

2741 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 areas2741 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture78 Reliability & Resilience99 Observability92 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 Architecture102 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. Streaming & Real-Time Data advanced

    Kafka replaced ZooKeeper with KRaft and added tiered storage. What problems did each address, and how do they change how a platform is operated and sized?

    2 min answer kafkakrafttiered-storageoperations
  2. Streaming & Real-Time Data advanced

    You are the architect for a platform where 30 teams both publish and consume events, and leadership asks you to set the company standard for exposing real-time data between teams. What do you standardise, what do you deliberately leave to teams, and how would you know the standard is working?

    3 min answer contractsownershipslosplatform
  3. Streaming Schema Evolution advanced

    A producer added a required field. New consumers work. A consumer replaying from three months ago fails. Why, and what is the policy fix?

    2 min answer schemacompatibilityreplay
  4. Streaming Schema Evolution advanced

    An event schema must change while consumers and retained history both depend on the old version. How is this managed?

    2 min answer schema-evolutioncompatibilityregistryretention
  5. Streaming Schema Evolution advanced

    Review this. A payments platform runs 300 topics with the schema registry in FULL compatibility mode for every subject, a rule that each new field must be optional with a default, and a schema-change request that goes to an architecture review board with a three-week turnaround. Engineers have started putting new data into a generic metadata map to avoid the queue. What would you remove, what would you change, and what would you leave alone?

    3 min answer schema-registrygovernancecompatibilitypayments
  6. Streaming Schema Evolution advanced

    Walk me through retiring a field from an event consumed by around 40 teams, where the field is populated from a system being decommissioned in six months.

    2 min answer schema evolutiondeprecationconsumer censuscompatibility
  7. Streaming SLOs advanced

    Tencent's DAGOR (SoCC 2018) detects overload in WeChat's microservice fleet from the average queuing time in a server's pending queue rather than from CPU, treats 20 ms as the overload threshold, and piggybacks the server's current admission level onto its responses so callers shed doomed work themselves. A streaming ingest tier has the same shape. What transfers, and where would copying it be a mistake?

    3 min answer tencentwechatload-sheddingadmission-control
  8. Streaming SLOs advanced

    What SLOs should a market-data streaming pipeline have, and what does each protect?

    2 min answer coindcxstreaming-slolagfreshness
  9. Streaming vs Batch advanced

    A business sponsor asks for a real-time data platform because "the competition has one". Reporting is currently a nightly batch that lands at 06:00 and nobody has complained. How do you handle this?

    2 min answer streamingbatchrequirementscost
  10. Watermarks & Late Data advanced

    A daily reconciliation shows the streaming aggregation is 2% below the batch equivalent. Both read the same source. Why?

    2 min answer streamingcorrectnesslate-data
  11. Watermarks & Late Data advanced

    A dispatch analytics pipeline computes per-minute aggregates and the numbers keep changing after the fact. What is happening, and what decisions must be made explicit?

    2 min answer swiggywatermarkslate-datawindowing
  12. Watermarks & Late Data advanced

    A streaming aggregation must produce results promptly while some events arrive minutes late. How do watermarks, windowing and allowed lateness interact, and what is the business decision underneath?

    2 min answer flinkwatermarkswindowinglate-data