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

A fantasy-sports platform faces a synchronised traffic spike in the minutes before a major match starts. Workers are saturated. What should be shed, in what order, and what must never be shed?

An AI inference service receives computationally expensive requests with unpredictable bursts, where a single request can occupy a GPU for many seconds. Which combination of controls should it use, and in what order do they apply?

Define the degradation ladder for an e-commerce site under extreme load. What is shed, in what order, and who decides?

One customer's batch job saturates a shared service and degrades everyone. Rate limiting them fixes it, until the next customer does the same. What is the structural answer?

Your service is at capacity and must reject some traffic. What do you shed, and how do you decide?

Your service will exceed capacity by 30% during a known peak. Do you shed load or brown out, and how do you decide what goes first?

A flash sale causes an incident. Two hours later the fault is fixed but 4 million jobs are backed up and notifications are hours late. Walk through recovery and prevention.

A notification service must deliver push notifications for mentions. What delivery guarantee do you offer, and how do you avoid sending duplicates?

A team proposes an event-streaming platform for a background job workflow processing a few hundred thousand jobs a day. What is gained, what is paid for, and when is a database-backed queue the better engineering decision?

For each of these, choose a queue or a stream and justify it — order fulfilment tasks, an audit trail, cache invalidation, and rebuilding a search index.

A dependency degrades to 2-second latency rather than failing outright, and retries triple the load on it. Why is slow worse than down, and which mechanisms actually prevent the amplification?

A dependency degrades. Your service retries three times with exponential backoff. The dependency never recovers until you deploy a change. Why?