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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. Content Delivery Networks advanced

    A media company plans a global live event and its CDN partner cannot guarantee capacity in one region. How should multi-CDN steering, origin shielding and per-region bitrate caps combine — and how do you prevent steering oscillation?

    2 min answer multi-cdnlive-streamingsteeringorigin-shield
  2. Content Delivery Networks intermediate

    A social platform serves large volumes of user-generated media with an extremely skewed popularity distribution and a cost-sensitive business. How should the delivery path be designed?

    2 min answer sharechatcdnskewcost
  3. Content Delivery Networks advanced

    A video platform receives a viral upload generating millions of playback requests within minutes. How should edge caching, origin shielding, cache warming, request collapsing, transcoding priority and storage access interact?

    2 min answer vimeoloomcdnorigin-shield
  4. Content Delivery Networks advanced

    After a content purge, your origin receives 400× normal traffic and falls over. The CDN is working as configured. What is missing and how do you fix it?

    2 min answer cdnorigin-shieldcachingthundering-herd
  5. Content Delivery Networks advanced

    Design the playback path for a global video streaming service. What are the architecturally significant decisions?

    2 min answer netflixcdndesigninterview
  6. Content Delivery Networks advanced

    Netflix places Open Connect appliances inside ISP networks and pre-positions content onto them during off-peak hours. Why is this fundamentally different from a conventional pull-through CDN, and what does it require from the content catalogue?

    2 min answer netflixopen-connectcdnpre-positioning
  7. Content Delivery Networks intermediate

    You put a CDN in front of your site. Cache hit rate is 12%. Origin load is barely reduced. Why?

    2 min answer cachingcdnperformance
  8. 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
  9. 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
  10. 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
  11. 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
  12. 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