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Quiz

126 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 areas126 Architecture Fundamentals2 Distributed Systems26 Data Architecture23 Cloud Architecture19 Networking3 API & Integration Architecture1 Reliability & Resilience4 Observability3 Performance & Capacity Engineering3 Security Architecture16 Cost Architecture & FinOps3 Business Architecture2 Architecture Communication2 Enterprise Architecture1 Legacy Modernization2 AI-Era Architecture3 Software Architecture & Engineering3 Architecture Patterns3 Architecture Decision-Making6 The Architect's Meta-Skills1
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

26 questions in Distributed Systems.

  1. Distributed Systems intermediate

    Design an order submission API that is safe when the client cannot tell whether its request succeeded. What exactly do you store, and when?

    2 min answer idempotencyapi-designretries
  2. Distributed Systems intermediate Multiple choice

    You move a user profile service to eventual consistency and support tickets start arriving: users update their name and the old one is still shown. Fix it without abandoning the architecture.

    2 min answer consistencyreplicationuxread-your-writes
  3. Distributed Transactions advanced

    Placing an order must reserve stock, charge the card and create a shipment across three services. Design it, and justify why not a distributed transaction.

    2 min answer sagatransactionspivotcompensation
  4. Event Streaming advanced Multiple choice

    Consumer lag on a Kafka topic grows during peak and does not recover overnight. You add consumers and nothing improves. Why?

    2 min answer kafkapartitionsconsumer-groupslag
  5. Failure Modes advanced

    One instance in a fleet of fifty is returning correct responses very slowly. Health checks pass and it stays in rotation. How do you detect and handle this?

    2 min answer grey-failurehealth-checksdetectionmitigation
  6. Leader Election advanced

    A nightly job occasionally runs twice, producing duplicate charges. The team proposes a distributed lock. What do you say?

    2 min answer leader-electionlockingidempotencyfencing
  7. Leader Election advanced

    Your cluster fails over spuriously under load, but a real leader failure takes 45 seconds to detect. How do you resolve the tension?

    2 min answer leader-electionfailoverdetectiontuning
  8. Load Shedding advanced

    One customer's batch job saturates a shared service and degrades everyone. Rate limiting them fixes it, until the next customer does the same. What is the structural answer?

    2 min answer multi-tenancyisolationadmission-controlfairness
  9. Load Shedding advanced

    Your service will exceed capacity by 30% during a known peak. Do you shed load or brown out, and how do you decide what goes first?

    2 min answer sheddingbrownoutdegradationprioritisation
  10. Messaging & Queues intermediate

    For each of these, choose a queue or a stream and justify it — order fulfilment tasks, an audit trail, cache invalidation, and rebuilding a search index.

    2 min answer queuesstreamsretentionreplay
  11. Sagas & Compensation advanced

    In an order saga, the shipment service permanently rejects an order after the card has been captured. What now?

    2 min answer sagacompensationpivotexceptions
  12. Service Discovery advanced

    Your service registry becomes unavailable. Every service is healthy. What happens, and what should happen?

    2 min answer discoverystatic-stabilityavailabilitycaching