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2667 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 areas2667 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture78 Reliability & Resilience88 Observability81 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture95 Cost Architecture & FinOps92 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication91 Enterprise Architecture91 Legacy Modernization92 AI-Era Architecture86 Software Architecture & Engineering84 Architecture Patterns84 Architecture Decision-Making91 The Architect's Meta-Skills92 Delivery & Release Engineering93 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience92 Testing & Quality Architecture90 Data Platform Architecture88 Streaming & Real-Time Data93 Data Governance & Semantics81 Frontend & Experience Architecture91 Edge, Mobile & IoT88 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture90 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk88
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

84 questions in Architecture Patterns.

  1. Orchestration vs Choreography advanced

    A workflow spans several services. What is the practical rule for choosing orchestration or choreography, and what is the design tell?

    2 min answer orchestrationchoreographyobligationsnotifications
  2. Orchestration vs Choreography advanced

    An interviewer says - we run order fulfilment across six services with events and no coordinator. Last quarter about 0.4% of orders ended in a state nobody noticed for days. Do not tell me to add tracing. What structural change do you make, and who gets paged?

    3 min answer choreographyprocess managerownershipon-call
  3. Orchestration vs Choreography advanced

    An order flows through payment, restaurant acceptance, courier assignment and delivery. Should the coordination be orchestrated or choreographed?

    2 min answer swiggyorchestrationchoreographysaga
  4. Outbox advanced

    A financial platform needs state changes to reliably produce events. When is the transactional outbox the right choice and when is change data capture better?

    2 min answer brexoutboxcdcevents
  5. Outbox advanced

    A service must update its database and publish an event, and both must happen or neither. Why is a dual write wrong, and how do the outbox pattern and log-based capture compare?

    3 min answer outboxcdcdual-writeatomicity
  6. Outbox intermediate

    A service must update its database and publish an event. Why is doing both directly incorrect, and what does the outbox pattern guarantee?

    2 min answer outboxdual-writeatomicityat-least-once
  7. Outbox advanced

    Orders are occasionally created in the database with no corresponding event reaching the warehouse. No errors are logged. Diagnose and fix.

    3 min answer outboxdual-writeconsistencyevents
  8. Pipes and Filters intermediate

    A logistics platform processes tracking events through validation, enrichment, deduplication, state transition and fan-out. What does the pipes-and-filters shape buy, and where does it break down?

    2 min answer delhiverypipelinestagesbackpressure
  9. Pipes and Filters intermediate

    A nightly recommendation pipeline has one stage consuming 80% of the wall-clock time. How do you diagnose it and what are your options?

    3 min answer pipelinesbatchspotifyperformance
  10. Pipes and Filters intermediate

    A team splits a single batch job into seven stages connected by queues, so each stage can scale and be retried independently. Throughput improves. What have they given up, and when does that bill arrive?

    2 min answer pipes and filtersqueueslatencyoperability
  11. Pipes and Filters intermediate

    A video platform's transcoding pipeline is a sequence of independent processing stages. What does the pipes-and-filters structure buy, and what must be added for it to work at scale?

    2 min answer pipes-and-filterspipelinestagesbackpressure
  12. Publish/Subscribe advanced

    A chat platform uses publish/subscribe to deliver messages to connected clients. What breaks when a channel has a million members, and what changes?

    2 min answer pubsubfan-outscalepresence