Portfolio ↗

Quiz

2988 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 areas2988 Architecture Fundamentals91 Distributed Systems111 Data Architecture100 Cloud Architecture97 Networking96 API & Integration Architecture97 Reliability & Resilience99 Observability92 Performance & Capacity Engineering100 Security Architecture105 Cost Architecture & FinOps102 Business Architecture103 Architecture Communication102 Enterprise Architecture100 Legacy Modernization102 AI-Era Architecture106 Software Architecture & Engineering93 Architecture Patterns94 Architecture Decision-Making101 The Architect's Meta-Skills102 Delivery & Release Engineering103 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience102 Testing & Quality Architecture102 Data Platform Architecture98 Streaming & Real-Time Data103 Data Governance & Semantics91 Frontend & Experience Architecture101 Edge, Mobile & IoT98 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture99 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk98
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

3 questions in Competing Consumers.

  1. Competing Consumers advanced

    A queue-backed worker pool processes image jobs. One consumer's process is alive and its health check passes, but it is blocked in a socket read to a storage service that never returns and has no timeout. Queue depth looks normal. What happens over the next hour and what would have caught it?

    3 min answer competing consumerslivenesstimeoutsqueue
  2. Competing Consumers advanced

    A team uses competing consumers to scale processing and discovers that ordering guarantees are broken. What happened, and what are the options?

    2 min answer segmentcompeting-consumersorderingpartitioning
  3. Competing Consumers advanced

    At 14:02 a consumer group of twelve workers is draining a partitioned order-events topic at 9,000 messages a second. By 14:07 throughput is zero while every worker is running and its health check passes, and queue depth is climbing. At 14:12 throughput returns for forty seconds and then stops again. The pattern repeats. What failed, and which design decision allowed it?

    3 min answer kafkaconsumer grouprebalancepoison message