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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. Service Mesh advanced

    A proposal for an internal tool serving 50 requests per second specifies a service mesh, distributed tracing, three databases, a message broker, distributed locks and multi-cluster deployment. What do you cut and what do you keep?

    3 min answer over-engineeringsimplicitymeshcritique
  2. Service Mesh advanced Multiple choice

    After a mesh rollout, one service's p99 rises from 30 ms to 70 ms, but only for calls to services in other namespaces. Same-namespace calls are unchanged. CPU on both sides is flat and the proxy reports no errors. What is the most likely cause?

    3 min answer service meshlatencylocalitycross-zone
  3. Sharding Patterns advanced

    A multi-tenant database is being sharded. One tenant holds 40% of the data and generates 60% of the queries. What is your shard key and what do you do about that tenant?

    3 min answer shardinghot-keymulti-tenancypinterest
  4. Sharding Patterns advanced Multiple choice

    A product must shard its primary data store. Which sharding pattern fits, and which decision is irreversible?

    2 min answer shardingroutingrebalancingshard-key
  5. Sharding Patterns advanced

    Notion sharded its Postgres estate into 480 logical shards in 2021 and in 2023 moved those shards onto a larger number of physical machines. A team that shards into 32 databases and later needs 96 faces a far harder job. What did the 2021 decision buy and what does it cost to maintain?

    3 min answer notionshardingreshardingpostgres
  6. Sidecar & Ambassador intermediate

    A platform is considering a sidecar to provide mTLS, retries and telemetry without changing application code. What does that buy and what does it cost?

    2 min answer chargebeesidecarservice-meshoperations
  7. Sidecar & Ambassador advanced

    A platform moves cross-cutting concerns into a sidecar process alongside every service. What does this solve, and what new problems appear?

    2 min answer sidecarcross-cuttingpolyglotoverhead
  8. Sidecar & Ambassador beginner Multiple choice

    A platform team rolls out sidecar proxies so every service gets mTLS without code changes. A month later an auditor captures traffic and finds one service still sending plaintext credentials to an external payments SaaS. The sidecar is running and healthy. Why is that traffic not encrypted by the mesh?

    3 min answer sidecarmtlsservice meshtrust boundaries
  9. Strangler Fig advanced

    A 15-year-old monolith must be modernised without a rewrite and without a feature freeze. Plan the migration.

    2 min answer stranglerlegacymigrationdata
  10. Strangler Fig advanced

    A 20-year-old order management system must be replaced. It cannot be paused and its business rules are undocumented. What is your approach and what is the hardest part?

    3 min answer strangler-figlegacymigrationdata
  11. Strangler Fig advanced Multiple choice

    A 2004-era order management system runs on an Oracle database where roughly 40 PL/SQL triggers and packages hold business rules that exist nowhere else. A facade is in place and three read-only capabilities already route to the new service. The team must now move its first write. Which rule should decide which write goes first?

    3 min answer strangler figoracletriggerscutover
  12. Strangler Fig advanced

    What distinguishes a strangler migration that completes from one that becomes permanent coexistence?

    2 min answer strangler-figdecommissioningsponsorshipcoexistence