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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. Career Development intermediate

    What changes between a senior engineer's job and an architect's, and what stays the same?

    2 min answer careerscopejudgementcommunication
  2. CDC Pipeline Design advanced

    A CDC pipeline feeding your warehouse falls three hours behind during a source system's batch job, and the source's transaction log retention is 24 hours. What is the risk and what do you change?

    2 min answer cdcstreamingretentionoperations
  3. CDC Pipeline Design advanced

    A content platform's search index lags the source by up to 30 minutes. Product wants it under 10 seconds. What do you assess?

    2 min answer searchcdcfreshnesscost
  4. CDC Pipeline Design advanced

    A logistics platform feeds its warehouse from operational databases by change data capture. What must the pipeline design handle?

    2 min answer delhiverycdcschemaordering
  5. CDC Pipeline Design advanced

    A platform builds change data capture from its operational databases. What is the failure that turns an analytics problem into a production incident?

    2 min answer cdcbackpressureretentionschema
  6. CDC Pipeline Design intermediate

    You are sizing the Kafka topic behind a CDC pipeline. The source Postgres takes about 12 million row changes a day across 40 tables, the average row is about 1.2 KB, the connector emits before and after images plus metadata, and the platform team wants 7 days of retention so a failed consumer can be rebuilt without a new snapshot. Roughly how much broker storage, and which assumption dominates the error?

    3 min answer cdckafkacapacity planningretention
  7. CDC to Stream intermediate

    A CDC connector on a 4 TB Postgres table is restarted with a changed configuration during business hours, and the operator does not realise this triggers a new initial snapshot. What happens over the next three hours, upstream and downstream?

    3 min answer cdcsnapshotreplication slotbackpressure
  8. CDC to Stream advanced

    A catalogue search index is rebuilt every night by a full extract of a 60-million-row product table. You must move it onto a change-data-capture stream with no search downtime and no window where the index is silently wrong. Sequence it so each step is reversible, and say where the point of no return is.

    3 min answer cdcsearch-indexingdivergencereversibility
  9. CDC to Stream advanced

    A platform publishes database changes as a stream for many consumers. What must the published stream provide that the raw change log does not?

    2 min answer cdccontractscouplingtransformation
  10. CDC to Stream advanced

    A service rebuilds its cache from a compacted topic after being offline for two weeks. It now holds records that were deleted. Why?

    2 min answer compactiontombstonescorrectness
  11. CDC to Stream advanced

    A team proposes exposing their service's database change stream via CDC so other teams can consume it, avoiding the work of building an event API. What is your assessment?

    2 min answer cdcintegrationcouplingcontracts
  12. Content Delivery Networks advanced

    A design platform's shared template suddenly goes viral, and one asset receives millions of requests within minutes. How should CDN caching, origin shielding, request collapsing, stale-while-revalidate and cache warming work together?

    3 min answer cdnorigin-shieldrequest-collapsingstale-while-revalidate