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2627 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 areas2627 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture77 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture78 Reliability & Resilience88 Observability81 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture85 Cost Architecture & FinOps82 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication91 Enterprise Architecture91 Legacy Modernization82 AI-Era Architecture86 Software Architecture & Engineering84 Architecture Patterns84 Architecture Decision-Making91 The Architect's Meta-Skills92 Delivery & Release Engineering93 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience92 Testing & Quality Architecture90 Data Platform Architecture88 Streaming & Real-Time Data93 Data Governance & Semantics81 Frontend & Experience Architecture91 Edge, Mobile & IoT88 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture90 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk88
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

84 questions in Architecture Patterns.

  1. Backend for Frontend intermediate

    A platform has a backend-for-frontend per client, and they have diverged with duplicated logic. Is BFF still the right pattern?

    2 min answer bffduplicationownershipshared-logic
  2. Backend for Frontend intermediate

    A product runs on web, iOS, Android and a television app. The shared API team is the bottleneck for every client change. Design the fix.

    3 min answer bffapi-designnetflixownership
  3. Backend for Frontend intermediate

    A quick-commerce platform serves a mobile app, a web app and a partner API from the same services. When does a backend-for-frontend earn its place?

    2 min answer zeptobffaggregationclients
  4. Backend for Frontend intermediate

    A travel platform with Booking.com's catalogue breadth replaces nine client-side calls with one backend-for-frontend call that fans out to the same nine services. Mobile p99 improves by 40% on the first day. Each of the nine services holds 99.9% availability. What has the team given up, and when does the bill arrive?

    3 min answer bffaggregationavailabilitypartial rendering
  5. Backend for Frontend intermediate

    Several client applications with different needs consume the same backend. When is a backend-for-frontend justified, and when does it become an unowned distributed monolith?

    2 min answer bffapi-designclientsownership
  6. Cell-Based Architecture advanced

    A SaaS platform has had three full outages this year, each affecting all customers. Propose an architectural response.

    2 min answer blast-radiuscellsavailability
  7. Cell-Based Architecture advanced

    A platform serving hundreds of millions of users adopts cell-based architecture. What does it buy that redundancy does not, and what does it cost?

    2 min answer cellsblast-radiusisolationcorrelated-failure
  8. Cell-Based Architecture advanced

    A platform with extreme peaks keeps having total outages caused by bad deployments and poisonous requests. Which pattern addresses this, and what does it cost?

    2 min answer dream11cellsblast-radiusisolation
  9. Cell-Based Architecture advanced

    Alibaba reported a peak of 583000 order creations per second during Singles' Day in 2020. A system that idles at a small fraction of that for 364 days cannot be validated by ordinary load testing. What does an organisation have to build to make that peak survivable, and where would copying it be a mistake?

    3 min answer alibabaflash salecapacityisolation
  10. Cell-Based Architecture advanced

    Your multi-tenant API assigns each customer to one of eight worker pools by hash. One customer's traffic pattern regularly degrades their pool. Improve it.

    2 min answer awsshuffle-shardingisolationmulti-tenancy
  11. Competing Consumers advanced

    A queue-backed worker pool processes image jobs. One consumer's process is alive and its health check passes, but it is blocked in a socket read to a storage service that never returns and has no timeout. Queue depth looks normal. What happens over the next hour and what would have caught it?

    3 min answer competing consumerslivenesstimeoutsqueue
  12. Competing Consumers intermediate

    A rendering platform processes jobs from a queue with a pool of workers. What does the competing-consumers pattern require to be correct, and what limits its scaling?

    2 min answer competing-consumersworkersidempotencyordering