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

A shipping aggregator books a shipment across carrier, warehouse, payment and notification systems, with no shared transaction available. Which coordination pattern fits, and what are the compensations that cannot exist?

Design the order-fulfilment saga for a marketplace where sellers can cancel, buyers can cancel, payments can fail asynchronously hours later, and items are unique. What states and compensations are required, and where does orchestration beat choreography?

In an order saga, the shipment service permanently rejects an order after the card has been captured. What now?

A mobility platform grows from a monolith to hundreds of services and finds that client-side load balancing libraries in five languages behave inconsistently during failures. What architectural move addresses this, and what does it cost?

Your service registry becomes unavailable. Every service is healthy. What happens, and what should happen?

A financial-data aggregator depends on hundreds of external banking APIs, some slow, some intermittently down, all with different behaviour. How should timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, caching, stale data and provider isolation interact?

A travel search fans out to 40 suppliers with latencies from 80 ms to 4 seconds and varying reliability. Which timeout strategy should the aggregator use?

Design the timeout configuration for a request that passes through gateway, orders, pricing and inventory. What numbers, and what rule generates them?