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Quiz

3114 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 areas3114 Architecture Fundamentals91 Distributed Systems111 Data Architecture100 Cloud Architecture97 Networking96 API & Integration Architecture97 Reliability & Resilience99 Observability102 Performance & Capacity Engineering100 Security Architecture105 Cost Architecture & FinOps102 Business Architecture103 Architecture Communication102 Enterprise Architecture111 Legacy Modernization102 AI-Era Architecture106 Software Architecture & Engineering103 Architecture Patterns94 Architecture Decision-Making112 The Architect's Meta-Skills113 Delivery & Release Engineering103 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience102 Testing & Quality Architecture113 Data Platform Architecture108 Streaming & Real-Time Data103 Data Governance & Semantics101 Frontend & Experience Architecture112 Edge, Mobile & IoT109 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture109 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk108
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

3114 questions.

  1. Real-Time Serving Layer advanced

    A feature needs personalised results in under 50 ms for millions of users. What is computed when?

    2 min answer servingprecomputationhybridfreshness
  2. Real-Time Serving Layer advanced

    A flash sale opens at a published time. The precomputed inventory and price data is served from a real-time serving layer whose caches were rebuilt an hour earlier during a deploy. What happens in the first ten seconds after the sale opens?

    3 min answer flash salecold cacherequest collapsingalibaba
  3. Real-Time Serving Layer intermediate Multiple choice

    A product page needs the current computed price for one product id at 40,000 reads per second with p99 under 25 ms. A stream processor already recomputes each product's price every few seconds from competitor and inventory events. Where should the read path go?

    3 min answer serving-layerkey-valuequeryable-stateolap
  4. Real-Time Serving Layer advanced

    A real-time platform must serve computed state to a low-latency request path. What should the serving layer look like?

    2 min answer serving-layerdecouplingfreshnessavailability
  5. Real User Monitoring intermediate

    A content platform's synthetic tests pass and users report slowness. What monitoring closes the gap?

    2 min answer pratilipirumfield-datasegmentation
  6. Real User Monitoring advanced

    A team's synthetic monitoring is green and users report the site is slow. What is the monitoring missing?

    1 min answer rumsyntheticpercentilessegmentation
  7. Real User Monitoring beginner

    Interaction to Next Paint replaced First Input Delay as a Core Web Vital on 12 March 2024. A site that passed FID comfortably can fail INP badly. What did FID measure, what does INP measure, and why does the change match user complaints better?

    3 min answer inpfidcore-web-vitalsrum
  8. Real User Monitoring advanced Multiple choice

    Real user monitoring shows p75 largest contentful paint at 2.1 seconds - comfortably inside target - while a marketing analysis shows a real drop in conversion from organic mobile traffic. Which measurement artefact most likely explains the gap?

    3 min answer rumsurvivorship-biasmeasurementsampling
  9. Real User Monitoring intermediate

    YouTube ran an opt-in experiment called Feather from 2009 that cut the video watch page from as much as 1.2 MB and dozens of requests down to 98 KB and 14 requests. The engineer who built it later published the outcome - after a week of data, average page latency had gone up. What happened, and what should it change about how a team reads its own field performance data?

    3 min answer youtubefield dataselection effectsegmentation
  10. Real-Time Analytical Stores intermediate Multiple choice

    A creator analytics feature must show per-minute view counts for 8 million creators over a 90-day window at p95 under 500 ms while ingesting 300 thousand view events per second. Work out the row counts and decide which storage shape fits.

    3 min answer rollupretentioncolumnarsizing
  11. Real-Time Analytical Stores advanced

    A platform needs sub-second analytical queries over a continuously updating dataset. What kind of store, and what are the trade-offs?

    2 min answer zerodhaolapingestionfreshness
  12. Real-Time Analytical Stores advanced

    A platform needs sub-second analytical queries over recent high-volume event data. What store characteristics matter?

    2 min answer realtime-analyticsingestioncardinalityretention