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Quiz

2627 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 areas2627 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture77 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture78 Reliability & Resilience88 Observability81 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture85 Cost Architecture & FinOps82 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication91 Enterprise Architecture91 Legacy Modernization82 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. Messaging & Queues intermediate

    A notification service must deliver push notifications for mentions. What delivery guarantee do you offer, and how do you avoid sending duplicates?

    2 min answer notificationsidempotencydeliverydesign
  2. Messaging & Queues intermediate

    A team proposes an event-streaming platform for a background job workflow processing a few hundred thousand jobs a day. What is gained, what is paid for, and when is a database-backed queue the better engineering decision?

    2 min answer queueskafkaoperational-costgitlab
  3. Messaging & Queues intermediate

    For each of these, choose a queue or a stream and justify it — order fulfilment tasks, an audit trail, cache invalidation, and rebuilding a search index.

    2 min answer queuesstreamsretentionreplay
  4. Retries & Backoff intermediate

    A wallet platform sees intermittent failures from a downstream bank, and its own retries turn a partial degradation into a total outage. What combination of controls prevents a retry storm?

    2 min answer mobikwikretry-stormbackoffjitter
  5. Sagas & Compensation intermediate

    A service updates its database and then publishes an event. Occasionally downstream systems are missing records. Diagnose and fix.

    2 min answer consistencymessagingoutbox
  6. Service Discovery intermediate Multiple choice

    A multi-tenant SaaS platform uses a service registry for discovery. The registry becomes unavailable during an incident. What should happen to running traffic, and what does that requirement imply about the design?

    1 min answer freshworksservice-discoverystatic-stabilitycaching
  7. Service Discovery intermediate Multiple choice

    Every deployment produces a 30-second burst of connection errors, even though the new instances are healthy. The registry shows correct data. What is the most likely cause?

    2 min answer service-discoverydeploymentdnsgraceful-shutdown
  8. Timeouts & Deadlines intermediate

    A service becomes unresponsive during an incident in a dependency it barely uses. Investigation finds the client had no read timeout. Explain the full mechanism.

    2 min answer timeoutspoolscascading-failure
  9. Timeouts & Deadlines intermediate

    Every service in your estate uses the client library's default timeout of 30 seconds. Why is that dangerous, and what would you set instead?

    2 min answer timeoutsresiliencecapacity