Quiz

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

101 questions in Distributed Systems.

Quiz

Placing an order must reserve stock, charge the card and create a shipment across three services. Design it, and justify why not a distributed transaction.

A downstream consumer has been failing for four days. Your event log retains three days. What happens?

A platform processes billions of events per day and requires ordering per customer but not globally. How should partition keys and consumer groups deliver that without creating a serialisation bottleneck?

A ride-hailing platform must process billions of location and trip events per day, with per-trip ordering. Design the partitioning, consumer scaling and failure handling.

Consumer lag on a Kafka topic grows during peak and does not recover overnight. You add consumers and nothing improves. Why?

Design the event ingestion path for a recommendation platform receiving billions of interaction events daily, where the same events must feed real-time personalisation and offline model training. How should the pipeline be structured?

You have 14 systems exchanging data through bespoke point-to-point pipelines. Adding a system means building integrations to six others. Propose an alternative.

A downstream service slows from 50 ms to 3 s. Within two minutes every service in the request path is down, including ones that do not call it. Explain the mechanism.

A ride-hailing platform has a severe driver shortage in one region. Demand estimation, pricing, dispatch, queueing and driver incentives all interact. How do you prevent an unstable feedback loop?

One instance in a fleet of 20 is failing 30% of its requests. Health checks pass, aggregate error rate is 1.5%, no alerts fire. How do you detect and handle this?

One instance in a fleet of fifty is returning correct responses very slowly. Health checks pass and it stays in rotation. How do you detect and handle this?

Roblox's 2021 outage lasted 73 hours after a service-discovery and key-value cluster degraded under contention. Trace the failure chain, and identify the three architectural properties that turned a degradation into a three-day outage.