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2777 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 areas2777 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture87 Reliability & Resilience99 Observability92 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture95 Cost Architecture & FinOps92 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication91 Enterprise Architecture100 Legacy Modernization92 AI-Era Architecture96 Software Architecture & Engineering93 Architecture Patterns84 Architecture Decision-Making91 The Architect's Meta-Skills92 Delivery & Release Engineering93 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience92 Testing & Quality Architecture102 Data Platform Architecture98 Streaming & Real-Time Data93 Data Governance & Semantics91 Frontend & Experience Architecture91 Edge, Mobile & IoT88 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture99 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk98
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

98 questions in Data Platform Architecture.

  1. Warehouse Migration advanced

    An organisation is migrating from a legacy data warehouse to a modern platform. How should it be sequenced, and why do these migrations so often end with both systems running permanently?

    2 min answer migrationwarehousedecommissioningparallel-run
  2. Warehouse Migration advanced

    An organisation migrates its warehouse to a new platform. What dominates the effort, and what makes these migrations fail?

    2 min answer warehouse-migrationtransformation-logicconsumersverification
  3. Warehouse Migration advanced

    During a warehouse migration parallel run, 40 reports produce different numbers on the new platform. How do you proceed?

    2 min answer migrationreconciliationstakeholders
  4. Warehouse Migration advanced

    Your analytics platform ingests change data from an operational estate that was split into 480 logical shards in 2021 and then spread across a larger number of physical database hosts in 2023, the arrangement Notion has described publicly. Your connectors, offsets and target tables are all configured per host. What does that physical move do to the downstream pipeline, and what design turns the next one into a configuration change rather than a re-ingest?

    3 min answer notionshardingcdcingestion contract
  5. Workflow Schedulers intermediate

    An interviewer says - we run one orchestrator with about 4,000 tasks a night, all written by the platform team. Leadership wants to open it to 12 product teams as self-service so they stop queueing behind us. Where do you take this?

    3 min answer orchestrationmulti-tenancyquotaspaved path
  6. Workflow Schedulers intermediate

    Every task in the data platform sits in a queued state. Worker CPU is around 6%, the metadata database is healthy, the task logs show nothing, and no task has failed. Someone proposes adding workers. What do you look at first, and what is probably happening?

    2 min answer airflowschedulersconcurrencysensors
  7. Workflow Schedulers advanced

    Pinterest has described replacing Pinball - its own open-sourced orchestrator - with Spinner, an internal platform built on a branch of Apache Airflow, moving more than 3000 workflows and 45000 tasks with translation tooling, workflow tiers and an in-house Kubernetes executor (Airflow Summit 2021). What forced the change, what did they take on, and where would copying it be a mistake?

    2 min answer pinterestairfloworchestrationplatform-migration
  8. Workflow Schedulers intermediate

    What should be evaluated when choosing a workflow scheduler for a data platform?

    2 min answer schedulersdependenciesbackfilloperability
  9. Workflow Schedulers intermediate Multiple choice

    Why is cron insufficient for a pipeline of interdependent data jobs?

    2 min answer orchestrationdependenciesbackfillidempotency
  10. Workload Isolation advanced

    A data platform's ad-hoc queries, scheduled pipelines and machine-learning training compete for the same capacity. How should they be isolated?

    2 min answer workload-isolationcontentionprioritybackfill
  11. Workload Isolation intermediate

    A data platform's interactive queries become unpredictable whenever a large pipeline runs. What is the fix, and what remains shared?

    2 min answer sharechatisolationcomputeclasses
  12. Workload Isolation intermediate Multiple choice

    A lakehouse platform runs interactive BI on its own compute cluster and pipelines on another, and both are sized comfortably. Every Tuesday and Wednesday queries against the ten largest tables run 3 to 6 times slower on both clusters at once, then recover by Thursday. Table maintenance - compaction and snapshot expiry - is submitted as low-priority work on the pipeline cluster. Which change fixes it?

    3 min answer compactionmaintenanceisolationsmall files