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Quiz

2908 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 areas2908 Architecture Fundamentals91 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture87 Reliability & Resilience99 Observability92 Performance & Capacity Engineering100 Security Architecture95 Cost Architecture & FinOps102 Business Architecture103 Architecture Communication102 Enterprise Architecture100 Legacy Modernization92 AI-Era Architecture96 Software Architecture & Engineering93 Architecture Patterns94 Architecture Decision-Making101 The Architect's Meta-Skills102 Delivery & Release Engineering103 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience102 Testing & Quality Architecture102 Data Platform Architecture98 Streaming & Real-Time Data103 Data Governance & Semantics91 Frontend & Experience Architecture101 Edge, Mobile & IoT98 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture99 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk98
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

103 questions in Streaming & Real-Time Data.

  1. Partition Keys & Ordering intermediate Multiple choice

    After scaling consumers from 3 to 12, downstream data shows updates applied out of order. What happened?

    2 min answer orderingpartitioningcorrectness
  2. Partition Keys & Ordering advanced

    Alibaba reported a peak of 583,000 order creations per second during Singles' Day 2020. Take that as the sizing input for a log-based order-event pipeline with per-buyer ordering. Roughly how many partitions does the order topic need, and which assumption dominates the error?

    2 min answer alibabapartitionscapacitypeak-event-readiness
  3. Partition Keys & Ordering advanced

    One customer generates 60% of your event volume. Their partition's consumer cannot keep up and the rest idle. What are your options?

    2 min answer skewmulti-tenancyscaling
  4. Real-Time Serving Layer advanced

    A contest platform must update leaderboards for millions of participants as scoring events arrive. What is the architecture, and what must not be attempted?

    2 min answer dream11leaderboardfanoutprecomputation
  5. Real-Time Serving Layer advanced

    A feature needs personalised results in under 50 ms for millions of users. What is computed when?

    2 min answer servingprecomputationhybridfreshness
  6. Real-Time Serving Layer advanced

    A flash sale opens at a published time. The precomputed inventory and price data is served from a real-time serving layer whose caches were rebuilt an hour earlier during a deploy. What happens in the first ten seconds after the sale opens?

    3 min answer flash salecold cacherequest collapsingalibaba
  7. Real-Time Serving Layer intermediate Multiple choice

    A product page needs the current computed price for one product id at 40,000 reads per second with p99 under 25 ms. A stream processor already recomputes each product's price every few seconds from competitor and inventory events. Where should the read path go?

    3 min answer serving-layerkey-valuequeryable-stateolap
  8. Real-Time Serving Layer advanced

    A real-time platform must serve computed state to a low-latency request path. What should the serving layer look like?

    2 min answer serving-layerdecouplingfreshnessavailability
  9. Real-Time Analytical Stores intermediate Multiple choice

    A creator analytics feature must show per-minute view counts for 8 million creators over a 90-day window at p95 under 500 ms while ingesting 300 thousand view events per second. Work out the row counts and decide which storage shape fits.

    3 min answer rollupretentioncolumnarsizing
  10. Real-Time Analytical Stores advanced

    A platform needs sub-second analytical queries over a continuously updating dataset. What kind of store, and what are the trade-offs?

    2 min answer zerodhaolapingestionfreshness
  11. Real-Time Analytical Stores advanced

    A platform needs sub-second analytical queries over recent high-volume event data. What store characteristics matter?

    2 min answer realtime-analyticsingestioncardinalityretention
  12. Real-Time Analytical Stores intermediate Multiple choice

    A team proposes a specialised real-time analytics store for an internal dashboard used by twelve analysts. Assess.

    2 min answer architecturecostdecision