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Quiz

2741 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 areas2741 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture78 Reliability & Resilience99 Observability92 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture95 Cost Architecture & FinOps92 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication91 Enterprise Architecture91 Legacy Modernization92 AI-Era Architecture96 Software Architecture & Engineering84 Architecture Patterns84 Architecture Decision-Making91 The Architect's Meta-Skills92 Delivery & Release Engineering93 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience92 Testing & Quality Architecture102 Data Platform Architecture98 Streaming & Real-Time Data93 Data Governance & Semantics91 Frontend & Experience Architecture91 Edge, Mobile & IoT88 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture90 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk98
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

2741 questions.

  1. Caching for Performance advanced

    What happens to your system if the entire cache tier is flushed at peak traffic?

    2 min answer cachecold-startcapacityfailure-modes
  2. Caching for Performance advanced

    Which caching failure appears only under load, and what are the fixes in order of deployability?

    2 min answer cache-stampedestale-while-revalidatecoalescingjitter
  3. Caching Strategies advanced

    A discussion platform has a handful of extremely popular threads receiving most reads and writes, and individual cache nodes become bottlenecks. How should hot-key detection, caching, coalescing, partitioning and asynchronous writes combine?

    3 min answer cachinghot-keyscoalescingreddit
  4. Caching Strategies advanced

    A popular cache key expires at peak. A thousand concurrent requests miss and hit the database simultaneously, and it falls over. Name three fixes and pick one to deploy first.

    3 min answer cachingthundering-herdstampedemeta
  5. Caching Strategies advanced

    A quick-commerce platform holds inventory across hundreds of dark stores that changes continuously. Which inventory data must be strongly consistent, which can be cached, and what should happen at checkout when the cached view is stale?

    2 min answer zeptoinventoryconsistencycaching
  6. Caching Strategies advanced

    A social platform has 1% of content receiving 90% of requests. How should adaptive caching, hot-key replication, request coalescing and partitioning work together?

    2 min answer sharechathot-keyskewreplication
  7. Caching Strategies advanced

    Chat clients download the full workspace user and channel directory on connect. For large workspaces this is slow and expensive. A CDN does not help. Why, and what does?

    2 min answer slackedgecachingapplication-aware
  8. Caching Strategies advanced

    Design read receipts and unread counts for a messaging product. Why is this harder than it looks?

    2 min answer messagingstatewrite-volumedesign
  9. Caching Strategies advanced

    Uber's Docstore (a sharded MySQL-backed document store) serves reads dominated by recently active trips. CacheFront put Redis in front of it. Why build the cache into the storage layer rather than leaving it to each caller, and how must invalidation, read-your-writes and post-failover warming behave?

    3 min answer uberdocstorecachefrontredis
  10. CAP & PACELC advanced

    A hotel reservation platform shows ten rooms remaining while thousands of users are viewing the property. Which operations require strong consistency and which can safely use stale cached availability?

    2 min answer consistencyavailabilitybookinginventory
  11. CAP & PACELC advanced

    Classify DynamoDB, Spanner and Cassandra under PACELC, and say which half of the classification you would actually design around.

    2 min answer pacelcconsistencylatencydatastores
  12. CAP & PACELC advanced Multiple choice

    PACELC extends CAP with an "else" branch. Why does that branch matter more in day-to-day operation?

    1 min answer cappacelclatencyconsistency