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Quiz

2948 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 areas2948 Architecture Fundamentals91 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking96 API & Integration Architecture87 Reliability & Resilience99 Observability92 Performance & Capacity Engineering100 Security Architecture105 Cost Architecture & FinOps102 Business Architecture103 Architecture Communication102 Enterprise Architecture100 Legacy Modernization102 AI-Era Architecture106 Software Architecture & Engineering93 Architecture Patterns94 Architecture Decision-Making101 The Architect's Meta-Skills102 Delivery & Release Engineering103 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience102 Testing & Quality Architecture102 Data Platform Architecture98 Streaming & Real-Time Data103 Data Governance & Semantics91 Frontend & Experience Architecture101 Edge, Mobile & IoT98 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture99 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk98
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

2948 questions.

  1. Open Table Formats intermediate Multiple choice

    A team has 90 TB of Parquet in Hive-style date directories and wants Iceberg tables with no downtime for the 200 dashboards reading them. Which sequence is right?

    3 min answer icebergmigrationhivemetadata
  2. Open Table Formats advanced

    A team is choosing between Iceberg, Delta and Hudi for a new lakehouse. How would you approach the decision?

    1 min answer data-platformtable-formatlock-in
  3. Open Table Formats advanced

    An Iceberg lakehouse on object storage is healthy. Then the storage service starts serving reads at about four times its usual latency with no errors at all. Nothing is down. Walk through what happens over the next ten minutes and what stops it.

    3 min answer icebergmetadataslow dependencyretry storm
  4. Open Table Formats advanced

    An organisation is consolidating a warehouse and a lake onto open table formats. What guarantees do ACID-on-object-storage tables provide, where do small files and compaction bite, and how are streaming and batch writers coordinated?

    3 min answer databricksdelta-lakeicebergcompaction
  5. Open Table Formats advanced Multiple choice

    Which requirement most often forces an open table format over plain files in object storage?

    2 min answer table-formatsdeletestransactionsschema-evolution
  6. Open Table Formats beginner

    Your team already writes compressed Parquet files to object storage and queries them with a SQL engine. An engineer proposes moving the same files to Iceberg. The bytes on disk barely change, so what does the table format actually add?

    2 min answer icebergparquettable-formatmetadata
  7. OpenTelemetry advanced

    A fleet exports OTLP to a gateway collector deployment with memory_limiter first in the pipeline, then a batch processor, then an exporter with a sending queue. The telemetry backend starts answering in 8 seconds instead of 80 ms, and request volume doubles at the same time. What happens second by second, and what stops it?

    2 min answer opentelemetrycollectorbackpressureload-shedding
  8. OpenTelemetry advanced

    A platform team runs a vendor-specific agent across 2,000 services feeding a metrics store holding billions of active series — the scale eBay described for Sherlock.io when it published its move to OpenTelemetry in 2022. They want to migrate to OpenTelemetry without a telemetry gap and without asking 400 application teams to coordinate. Give the sequence, and say where the data can silently diverge.

    4 min answer ebayopentelemetrymigrationdual emit
  9. OpenTelemetry advanced

    A platform team standardises every service on OTLP push to a collector and switches off Prometheus scraping. Metrics still arrive and dashboards still work. What has the team given up, and when does that bill arrive?

    3 min answer opentelemetryprometheuspushscrape
  10. OpenTelemetry intermediate

    A platform with services in five languages and three monitoring vendors considers adopting OpenTelemetry. What does it solve, and what is the realistic migration cost?

    2 min answer opentelemetrystandardisationvendor-lock-inmigration
  11. OpenTelemetry intermediate

    An organisation with several existing telemetry systems considers adopting OpenTelemetry. What does it actually solve, and what does adopting it not fix?

    2 min answer segmentopentelemetrystandardsvendor-lock-in
  12. Operating Models advanced

    A 900-person engineering organisation funds work as 9-month projects. A project receives a budget and a team drawn from a resourcing pool; both dissolve at go-live. Run costs land on a central operations group of 30 people who support about 140 services. The CTO wants durable product teams that own their services in production. Sequence this change over four quarters without stopping delivery.

    3 min answer operating-modelfunding-modelownershipyou-build-it-you-run-it