Quiz

126 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 areas126 Architecture Fundamentals2 Distributed Systems26 Data Architecture23 Cloud Architecture19 Networking3 API & Integration Architecture1 Reliability & Resilience4 Observability3 Performance & Capacity Engineering3 Security Architecture16 Cost Architecture & FinOps3 Business Architecture2 Architecture Communication2 Enterprise Architecture1 Legacy Modernization2 AI-Era Architecture3 Software Architecture & Engineering3 Architecture Patterns3 Architecture Decision-Making6 The Architect's Meta-Skills1

Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

6 questions in Distributed Systems.

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
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
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
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
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
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

Quiz

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.