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2948 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 areas2948 Architecture Fundamentals91 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking96 API & Integration Architecture87 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 Trade-off Analysis.

  1. Trade-off Analysis advanced

    A SaaS vendor's documented recovery posture is point-in-time restore for any individual data store. Atlassian's April 2022 incident tested it at scale - sites for 775 customers were deleted at once, no customer lost more than five minutes of data, and the last sites came back on 18 April. Which number had the organisation actually been buying, and what would you change first?

    3 min answer atlassianrportodisaster-recovery
  2. Trade-off Analysis advanced

    Dropbox moved file storage off Amazon S3 onto its own infrastructure - Magic Pocket - completing the migration in 2016. What did that decision buy and what did it pay, and which facts about your own situation would have to be true before the same move is defensible?

    3 min answer dropboxbuild-vs-buyunit-economicsstorage
  3. Trade-off Analysis advanced

    Product requires strong consistency and p99 latency under 100 ms for a globally distributed user base. Both are non-negotiable. What do you do?

    2 min answer tradeoffsconsistencyrequirements
  4. Trade-off Analysis advanced

    When Notion sharded its Postgres database in 2021 it created 480 logical shards spread across 32 physical instances, 15 per host. In 2023 it moved to 96 hosts with 5 logical shards each, keeping the same 480. What did the original choice buy, what did it cost, and what would you have had to believe to choose 32 logical shards instead?

    3 min answer notionshardingreversibilitycapacity