Portfolio ↗

Quiz

2948 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 areas2948 Architecture Fundamentals91 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking96 API & Integration Architecture87 Reliability & Resilience99 Observability92 Performance & Capacity Engineering100 Security Architecture105 Cost Architecture & FinOps102 Business Architecture103 Architecture Communication102 Enterprise Architecture100 Legacy Modernization102 AI-Era Architecture106 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. Streaming Joins advanced

    A job interval-joins click events to impression events with a two-hour window. To fix a parser bug the team resets only the click consumer's offsets to three days ago and lets the running job catch up. Walk through what happens, what the output looks like, and what stops it.

    3 min answer interval joinwatermarksreplaybackfill
  2. Streaming Joins advanced

    A pipeline must join two streams whose events arrive at different times. What makes streaming joins hard, and what are the options?

    2 min answer streaming-joinsstatewindowsenrichment
  3. Streaming & Real-Time Data advanced

    A delivery platform assigns each order to the nearest available driver as soon as the order is ready. Critique this.

    2 min answer doordashoptimisationmatchinglatency
  4. Streaming & Real-Time Data advanced

    A live platform computes real-time metrics during events where concurrency changes by an order of magnitude within minutes. What must the streaming architecture provide?

    2 min answer streaminglive-eventslagpartitioning
  5. Streaming & Real-Time Data advanced

    Kafka replaced ZooKeeper with KRaft and added tiered storage. What problems did each address, and how do they change how a platform is operated and sized?

    2 min answer kafkakrafttiered-storageoperations
  6. Streaming & Real-Time Data advanced

    You are the architect for a platform where 30 teams both publish and consume events, and leadership asks you to set the company standard for exposing real-time data between teams. What do you standardise, what do you deliberately leave to teams, and how would you know the standard is working?

    3 min answer contractsownershipslosplatform
  7. Streaming Schema Evolution advanced

    A producer added a required field. New consumers work. A consumer replaying from three months ago fails. Why, and what is the policy fix?

    2 min answer schemacompatibilityreplay
  8. Streaming Schema Evolution intermediate

    A team needs to change the schema of an event that many consumers read. What is the safe process?

    2 min answer sharechatschemacompatibilityregistry
  9. Streaming Schema Evolution intermediate Multiple choice

    A topic's subject is registered with FORWARD compatibility. A producer team adds a new field with no default and plans to ship the producer first and let 30 consumer teams upgrade over the following month. A reviewer blocks the change saying the compatibility mode already settled the order and the plan is backwards. Who is right?

    3 min answer schema-registrycompatibilitydeployment-orderavro
  10. Streaming Schema Evolution advanced

    An event schema must change while consumers and retained history both depend on the old version. How is this managed?

    2 min answer schema-evolutioncompatibilityregistryretention
  11. Streaming Schema Evolution advanced

    Review this. A payments platform runs 300 topics with the schema registry in FULL compatibility mode for every subject, a rule that each new field must be optional with a default, and a schema-change request that goes to an architecture review board with a three-week turnaround. Engineers have started putting new data into a generic metadata map to avoid the queue. What would you remove, what would you change, and what would you leave alone?

    3 min answer schema-registrygovernancecompatibilitypayments
  12. Streaming Schema Evolution advanced

    Walk me through retiring a field from an event consumed by around 40 teams, where the field is populated from a system being decommissioned in six months.

    2 min answer schema evolutiondeprecationconsumer censuscompatibility