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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. Real-Time Analytical Stores advanced Multiple choice

    A telemetry product must answer arbitrary filtered queries over hundreds of billions of events retained for 15 months, with sub-10-second response for the last 24 hours. Each event has 40 to 200 fields and cardinality is unbounded. Which storage design fits?

    3 min answer datadoghuskycolumnarobject storage
  2. Stateful Stream Processing advanced

    A stateful stream processor's state grows continuously and recovery takes hours. What design changes address this?

    2 min answer statecheckpointingrecoveryttl
  3. Stateful Stream Processing advanced

    A stream processing job has run fine for four months. It now fails with out-of-memory errors every few hours. No code has changed. Diagnose.

    2 min answer streamingstatettlcapacity
  4. Stateful Stream Processing advanced

    A stream processing job has run for four months and now fails with out-of-memory errors every few hours. No code has changed. Diagnose.

    2 min answer streamingstateoperations
  5. Stateful Stream Processing advanced

    A stream processor maintains per-vehicle state across events. What does that require operationally, and where does it break?

    2 min answer porterstatecheckpointingrebalancing
  6. Stateful Stream Processing advanced

    A windowed job writes one row per hour into a reporting table. Overnight the autoscaler kills a task manager twice - at 03:14 and at 05:40 - and each time the job restores from a checkpoint taken about two minutes earlier and resumes with no errors. Next morning 2 of the 24 hourly rows are roughly double. Every checkpoint in the window completed successfully. What failed?

    3 min answer checkpointingtimersidempotent-sinkduplicates
  7. Stream Processing Frameworks advanced

    A Flink job checkpoints every 60 seconds. State has grown so that one checkpoint now takes 90 seconds to complete. No configuration changes. What happens over the next hour, and which metric will not show it?

    3 min answer flinkcheckpointingbackpressurestate
  8. Stream Processing Frameworks advanced Multiple choice

    A keyed aggregation holds about 2 TB of state across 48 task slots on a heap state backend with 64 GB of heap per task manager. Checkpoints take 11 minutes and the job dies with multi-second garbage-collection pauses about once a day. Throughput is within target. Which change addresses the actual constraint?

    3 min answer flinkstate-backendrocksdbcheckpointing
  9. Stream Processing Frameworks intermediate Multiple choice

    A team must join an order stream keyed by order id to a payment stream that carries order id but is keyed by payment id, with 12 partitions on one topic and 48 on the other, matching within seven days and with a standing requirement to reprocess the last 30 days after a logic fix. Which runtime fits and what is the deciding property?

    3 min answer flinkkafka streamscopartitioningstate
  10. Stream Processing Frameworks beginner

    A team runs 400 events per second through a pipeline with Kafka Streams for routing, Flink for windowed aggregation and a Spark job for a nightly correction pass, maintained by four engineers. Two of the three have had production incidents this quarter. What would you remove, what would you keep, and what would you leave alone even though it looks odd?

    3 min answer simplificationoperational costframework choiceright-sizing
  11. Stream Processing Frameworks advanced

    What justifies a stream processing framework over a simple consumer loop?

    2 min answer streamingstatewatermarkscheckpointing
  12. Stream Processing Frameworks advanced

    What should drive the choice of stream processing framework for a high-volume recommendation platform?

    2 min answer frameworksstateexactly-onceoperability