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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. VPC Design intermediate

    You are designing the network for a platform expected to run for a decade, spanning multiple regions, with acquisitions likely. What do you decide on day one and why?

    2 min answer vpccidrtransit-gatewayplanning
  2. Warehouse, Lake & Lakehouse intermediate

    How should a platform decide between a warehouse, a lake and a lakehouse for a given workload?

    2 min answer warehouselakelakehouseworkload-fit
  3. Warehouse, Lake & Lakehouse intermediate

    Notion runs its product on sharded Postgres and originally loaded analytics into a managed warehouse through off-the-shelf connectors. In 2022 it built its own data lake on change data capture into Kafka, Hudi tables and S3 instead. What forced that, and where would copying it be a mistake?

    2 min answer notionhudicdclakehouse
  4. Waste Elimination intermediate

    A platform wants to eliminate infrastructure waste. What are the highest-return categories, and which apparent waste should be left alone?

    2 min answer wastereclamationheadroomautomation
  5. Waste Elimination intermediate

    A platform's infrastructure is over-provisioned but nobody can say by how much. What is the systematic approach to finding and removing waste?

    2 min answer modalrightsizingwasteutilisation
  6. Waste Elimination intermediate

    How would you identify workloads that are running and serving no purpose, and how would you make removing them safe?

    2 min answer wastezombiesorphansownership
  7. Web Performance Budgets intermediate

    A booking site sets a JavaScript budget. Six months later it is exceeded on every page. What was missing?

    1 min answer performance-budgetciregressionownership
  8. WebSockets & Realtime intermediate Multiple choice

    A collaborative editor needs to push document changes to connected clients with minimal latency. Which transport should it use, and what does the choice imply for infrastructure?

    2 min answer websocketssserealtimestateful-tier
  9. Windowing intermediate

    A live dashboard's "views in the last 30 minutes" reads about 30 times the true number. The job emits a 30-minute window advancing every minute; individual window values look correct when spot-checked; the sink is a time-series table and the panel sums the rows in the selected range. Lag and CPU are normal. What is happening and what do you change?

    3 min answer windowinghopping windowsdouble countingsinks
  10. Workflow Schedulers intermediate

    An interviewer says - we run one orchestrator with about 4,000 tasks a night, all written by the platform team. Leadership wants to open it to 12 product teams as self-service so they stop queueing behind us. Where do you take this?

    3 min answer orchestrationmulti-tenancyquotaspaved path
  11. Workflow Schedulers intermediate

    Every task in the data platform sits in a queued state. Worker CPU is around 6%, the metadata database is healthy, the task logs show nothing, and no task has failed. Someone proposes adding workers. What do you look at first, and what is probably happening?

    2 min answer airflowschedulersconcurrencysensors
  12. Workflow Schedulers intermediate

    What should be evaluated when choosing a workflow scheduler for a data platform?

    2 min answer schedulersdependenciesbackfilloperability