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Quiz

174 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 areas174 Architecture Fundamentals5 Distributed Systems26 Data Architecture23 Cloud Architecture19 Networking17 API & Integration Architecture13 Reliability & Resilience9 Observability8 Performance & Capacity Engineering6 Security Architecture16 Cost Architecture & FinOps3 Business Architecture2 Architecture Communication2 Enterprise Architecture1 Legacy Modernization2 AI-Era Architecture3 Software Architecture & Engineering3 Architecture Patterns6 Architecture Decision-Making9 The Architect's Meta-Skills1
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

23 questions in Data Architecture.

  1. Change Data Capture advanced

    A downstream team needs to react to order changes. The order service can publish events, or they can consume CDC from its database. Which, and why?

    2 min answer cdceventscouplingintegration
  2. CQRS intermediate Multiple choice

    A team proposes CQRS for a CRUD admin panel because reads are slow. Is that the right call?

    2 min answer cqrsover-engineeringread-model
  3. Data Architecture intermediate

    A dashboard query that took 200ms now takes 40 seconds. The table has grown to 200 million rows. Walk me through diagnosis and fix, including what you would not do.

    3 min answer indexingquery-performancedatabasesdiagnosis
  4. Data Architecture advanced

    A multi-tenant SaaS product has outgrown one database. You must shard. How do you choose the partition key, and what makes this decision so expensive to get wrong?

    2 min answer shardingpartitioningmulti-tenancyscaling
  5. Data Architecture intermediate

    A product catalogue page does 40,000 reads per second against a database that can serve 5,000. Walk me through the caching design, including what happens at 3 AM when the cache is empty.

    2 min answer cachingperformancestampedeavailability
  6. Data Architecture intermediate Multiple choice

    A service writes to its database and then publishes an event to Kafka. Sometimes consumers see an event for a record that does not exist, and sometimes a record exists with no event. Why, and how do you fix it?

    2 min answer outboxconsistencyevent-drivenintegration
  7. Data Architecture advanced

    Discord stores trillions of messages. What is their partition key, and what problem does the second half of it solve?

    2 min answer case-studydiscordpartitioninghot-partition
  8. Data Architecture advanced

    Netflix personalises an entire home page in the time a TV takes to draw a screen. How, given that scoring every title for every member on request is impossible?

    2 min answer case-studynetflixprecomputationcqrs
  9. Data Architecture advanced Multiple choice

    Uber indexes the world with hexagons rather than squares for surge pricing and dispatch. Why does the shape matter, and what is the general lesson?

    2 min answer case-studyubergeospatialindexing
  10. Data Governance intermediate

    A dashboard has been wrong for three weeks. Nobody knows which upstream produced the table it reads. What is the governance failure, and what fixes it?

    2 min answer governancelineageownershipcontracts
  11. Data Lakes & Lakehouses advanced

    You are asked to choose between a cloud data warehouse and a lakehouse for a new analytics platform. How do you decide?

    2 min answer lakehousewarehouselock-indecision-making
  12. Data Lifecycle & Retention advanced

    A GDPR erasure request arrives for a customer. Where does their data actually live, and what makes this expensive to retrofit?

    2 min answer gdprerasureprivacylifecycle