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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

4 questions in Sharding Patterns.

  1. Sharding Patterns advanced

    A multi-tenant database is being sharded. One tenant holds 40% of the data and generates 60% of the queries. What is your shard key and what do you do about that tenant?

    3 min answer shardinghot-keymulti-tenancypinterest
  2. Sharding Patterns advanced Multiple choice

    A product must shard its primary data store. Which sharding pattern fits, and which decision is irreversible?

    2 min answer shardingroutingrebalancingshard-key
  3. Sharding Patterns advanced

    An interviewer says - we shard the way Pinterest documented it: the shard id is packed into every object id, routing needs no lookup table, and an object never leaves the shard it was created on. Tell me what that decision has already decided for us, then tell me what you do about the first query that has to span shards.

    3 min answer pinterestshardingidentifiersscatter-gather
  4. Sharding Patterns advanced

    Notion sharded its Postgres estate into 480 logical shards in 2021 and in 2023 moved those shards onto a larger number of physical machines. A team that shards into 32 databases and later needs 96 faces a far harder job. What did the 2021 decision buy and what does it cost to maintain?

    3 min answer notionshardingreshardingpostgres