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Quiz

2777 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 areas2777 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture87 Reliability & Resilience99 Observability92 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture95 Cost Architecture & FinOps92 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication91 Enterprise Architecture100 Legacy Modernization92 AI-Era Architecture96 Software Architecture & Engineering93 Architecture Patterns84 Architecture Decision-Making91 The Architect's Meta-Skills92 Delivery & Release Engineering93 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience92 Testing & Quality Architecture102 Data Platform Architecture98 Streaming & Real-Time Data93 Data Governance & Semantics91 Frontend & Experience Architecture91 Edge, Mobile & IoT88 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture99 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk98
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

1029 questions.

  1. Stakeholder Analysis intermediate

    You are handed a design brief for a system spanning four departments. What do you do before designing anything?

    1 min answer stakeholdersrequirementsbusiness-architecture
  2. Static Stability intermediate

    A service fetches a feature flag value and a database credential from central services on every request. What is wrong?

    2 min answer amazoncontrol-planeavailabilitycaching
  3. Static Stability intermediate

    During a peak event, a platform's configuration service becomes unavailable. What should happen to the serving path, and what design property is being tested?

    2 min answer dream11static-stabilityconfigurationcontrol-plane
  4. Static Stability intermediate

    Explain static stability, and give two examples of designs that violate it.

    2 min answer awsresiliencecontrol-planeconcept
  5. Storage Costs intermediate

    A content platform's storage costs are dominated by content that is rarely accessed. How should tiering, lifecycle and access patterns be designed?

    2 min answer pratilipistoragetieringlifecycle
  6. Storage Costs intermediate

    A video platform's storage grows monotonically while most content is watched rarely after its first weeks. What storage cost strategy applies, and what are the traps?

    2 min answer storage-costtieringlifecycleretention
  7. Storage Costs intermediate

    Storage spend is growing faster than data volume. What are the likely causes?

    2 min answer storagesnapshotstieringretention
  8. Storage Layout & Partitioning intermediate Multiple choice

    A 4 TB events table serves three query patterns: 80% ask for one tenant over the last 7 days, 15% look up a single event by id, and 5% scan one product across all history. The table currently has no partitioning. Which layout should the team adopt?

    2 min answer partitioningclusteringcardinalitylayout
  9. Storage Layout & Partitioning intermediate

    A 6 TB events table is partitioned by `customer_id`. Queries are slow and the storage layer complains. What is wrong?

    2 min answer partitioningperformancedesign
  10. Stream Processing Frameworks intermediate Multiple choice

    A team must join an order stream keyed by order id to a payment stream that carries order id but is keyed by payment id, with 12 partitions on one topic and 48 on the other, matching within seven days and with a standing requirement to reprocess the last 30 days after a logic fix. Which runtime fits and what is the deciding property?

    3 min answer flinkkafka streamscopartitioningstate
  11. Stream-Table Duality intermediate

    Review this design. Each of 18 services embeds a Kafka Streams GlobalKTable of a 9-million-row customer topic so that lookups are local, each instance holding it in RocksDB on local disk. Instances take 11 minutes to become ready. What would you remove, what would you change, and what would you leave alone even though it looks odd?

    3 min answer globalktablematerialised viewrestore timedeploys
  12. Streaming Cost intermediate

    A marketplace platform at Flipkart's scale runs three separate Kafka clusters for orders, device telemetry and experimentation. Consolidating them into one shared cluster cuts the infrastructure bill by about 40%. What did that 40% buy, and when does the bill arrive?

    2 min answer flipkartmulti-tenancyquotasstreaming-cost