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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

21 questions in Distributed Systems.

  1. Circuit Breakers intermediate Multiple choice

    A team proposes circuit breakers on every downstream call. What would you add, and why is the breaker not the most important control?

    2 min answer circuit-breakerbulkheadisolationfallback
  2. Circuit Breakers intermediate

    Your circuit breaker opens during normal traffic spikes, causing outages it was meant to prevent. How do you configure it correctly?

    2 min answer resiliencetuningfailure
  3. Consistency Models intermediate Multiple choice

    After a user updates their profile, the page sometimes shows the old value. The team says this is normal eventual consistency. Is that acceptable?

    2 min answer consistencyuxsession-guarantees
  4. Distributed Systems intermediate

    An order service must notify inventory, billing, shipping and analytics when an order is placed. Synchronous calls or events? Justify your choice per consumer.

    2 min answer event-drivencouplingavailabilityintegration
  5. Distributed Systems intermediate

    Design an order submission API that is safe when the client cannot tell whether its request succeeded. What exactly do you store, and when?

    2 min answer idempotencyapi-designretries
  6. Distributed Systems intermediate Multiple choice

    You move a user profile service to eventual consistency and support tickets start arriving: users update their name and the old one is still shown. Fix it without abandoning the architecture.

    2 min answer consistencyreplicationuxread-your-writes
  7. Event Streaming intermediate

    A downstream consumer has been failing for four days. Your event log retains three days. What happens?

    2 min answer kafkaretentiondata-lossmonitoring
  8. Event Streaming intermediate Multiple choice

    A platform processes billions of events per day and requires ordering per customer but not globally. How should partition keys and consumer groups deliver that without creating a serialisation bottleneck?

    2 min answer confluentkafkapartitioningordering
  9. Event Streaming intermediate Multiple choice

    You have 14 systems exchanging data through bespoke point-to-point pipelines. Adding a system means building integrations to six others. Propose an alternative.

    2 min answer linkedinkafkaintegrationcoupling
  10. Idempotency intermediate Multiple choice

    A marketplace checkout calls a payment API. Mobile clients on poor networks time out and retry, and some customers are charged twice. Where exactly must the deduplication record be written for this to be fixed?

    2 min answer idempotencyretriespaymentscorrectness
  11. Leader Election intermediate Multiple choice

    Your company runs two data centres and wants automatic database failover between them. What is missing?

    2 min answer quorumsplit-brainmulti-regiondesign
  12. Load Shedding intermediate

    Define the degradation ladder for an e-commerce site under extreme load. What is shed, in what order, and who decides?

    2 min answer retaildegradationprioritisationbusiness