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Quiz

2988 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 areas2988 Architecture Fundamentals91 Distributed Systems111 Data Architecture100 Cloud Architecture97 Networking96 API & Integration Architecture97 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

2988 questions.

  1. Real-Time Analytical Stores advanced Multiple choice

    A telemetry product must answer arbitrary filtered queries over hundreds of billions of events retained for 15 months, with sub-10-second response for the last 24 hours. Each event has 40 to 200 fields and cardinality is unbounded. Which storage design fits?

    3 min answer datadoghuskycolumnarobject storage
  2. Rebuild vs Re-architect advanced

    A 15-year-old system is unmaintainable. The team wants a full rewrite. What do you advise?

    2 min answer modernizationriskdecision
  3. Rebuild vs Re-architect advanced

    A platform's core system cannot support a capability the business needs. The team proposes a rebuild. What must be true for rebuild to beat incremental re-architecture?

    2 min answer rebuildrewriteincrementalrisk
  4. Rebuild vs Re-architect advanced

    An organisation running Kafka at trillions of messages per day concludes the coordination and rebalancing model no longer fits and builds a replacement. What evidence should exist before replacing a proven system rather than tuning it?

    3 min answer linkedinkafkanorthguardreplacement
  5. Rebuild vs Re-architect intermediate

    Review this plan. Eighteen months to rebuild the policy engine. Feature parity is required before any traffic moves. The legacy team is frozen to bug fixes only so that no effort is wasted on code that will be thrown away. What would you remove, what would you change, and what would you leave alone?

    3 min answer rewritefeature-parityarchitecture-reviewincremental-migration
  6. Rebuild vs Re-architect advanced

    YouTube's database team was running a growing fleet of MySQL instances with sharding logic spread through application code. Rather than replace MySQL or rewrite the application, they built Vitess as a routing tier between the two, open-sourcing it in 2011; it graduated in the CNCF in 2019. What did that choice buy, what did it cost, and where would copying it be a mistake?

    3 min answer youtubevitessshardingproxy layer
  7. Records Retention & Legal Hold beginner

    A policy says customer records are deleted seven years after the relationship ends. A team implements it literally and still fails the audit. What actually starts the clock, and what does that force into the design?

    2 min answer retentiondeletionobject-lockcrypto-shredding
  8. Records Retention & Legal Hold advanced

    A regulated fintech must prove every customer-facing balance can be reconstructed from an audit trail. Compare event sourcing, CDC into an immutable log, and conventional tables with a triggered audit log.

    3 min answer nubankevent-sourcingcdcaudit
  9. Records Retention & Legal Hold advanced

    Litigation requires preserving all records relating to a matter, overriding normal retention. How is that implemented?

    2 min answer legal-holdretentionpreservationdiscovery
  10. Records Retention & Legal Hold intermediate

    Litigation requires preserving every record relating to one counterparty, overriding a retention policy that deletes after seven years. The data sits in a 400 TB object-store data lake, roughly 60,000 Parquet files, and the relevant rows are perhaps 3% of them spread across most files. Estimate the cost of implementing the hold, and say what you would do.

    3 min answer legal-holdobject-storagetable-formatsretention
  11. Records Retention & Legal Hold advanced

    On 27 September 2022 the SEC and CFTC announced settlements with 15 broker-dealers and one investment adviser totalling over $1.1bn, with individual SEC penalties ranging from $10M to $125M, for failing to preserve business communications conducted on personal messaging apps. What was the architectural failure, and what does it teach about capture obligations generally?

    3 min answer secrecordkeepingcaptureretention
  12. Records Retention & Legal Hold advanced

    Your automated retention job deletes records after seven years. Legal informs you that litigation is anticipated involving accounts from nine years ago. What now?

    2 min answer legal-holdretentionarchitecture