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

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101 questions in Distributed Systems.

Quiz

A wallet platform sees intermittent failures from a downstream bank, and its own retries turn a partial degradation into a total outage. What combination of controls prevents a retry storm?

During a regional degradation, a mobility platform's services perform millions of retries against a slow dependency, and the dependency never recovers until traffic is manually cut. Analyse the failure and identify which four controls would have prevented it.

A long-running customer workflow spanning payment, verification, notification and fulfilment must survive worker crashes and deploys mid-flow. Compare a hand-written saga with a durable-execution engine.

A marketplace charges the customer, pays the merchant, pays the courier and takes a fee. Design the transaction, and say what happens if the courier payment fails.

A service updates its database and then publishes an event. Occasionally downstream systems are missing records. Diagnose and fix.

A shipping aggregator books a shipment across carrier, warehouse, payment and notification systems, with no shared transaction available. Which coordination pattern fits, and what are the compensations that cannot exist?

Design the order-fulfilment saga for a marketplace where sellers can cancel, buyers can cancel, payments can fail asynchronously hours later, and items are unique. What states and compensations are required, and where does orchestration beat choreography?

In an order saga, the shipment service permanently rejects an order after the card has been captured. What now?

A mobility platform grows from a monolith to hundreds of services and finds that client-side load balancing libraries in five languages behave inconsistently during failures. What architectural move addresses this, and what does it cost?

A multi-tenant SaaS platform uses a service registry for discovery. The registry becomes unavailable during an incident. What should happen to running traffic, and what does that requirement imply about the design?

Every deployment produces a 30-second burst of connection errors, even though the new instances are healthy. The registry shows correct data. What is the most likely cause?

Your service registry becomes unavailable. Every service is healthy. What happens, and what should happen?