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Quiz

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

2777 questions.

  1. Distributed Systems intermediate

    An order service must notify inventory, billing, shipping and analytics when an order is placed. Synchronous calls or events? Justify your choice per consumer.

    2 min answer event-drivencouplingavailabilityintegration
  2. Distributed Systems intermediate

    Design an order submission API that is safe when the client cannot tell whether its request succeeded. What exactly do you store, and when?

    2 min answer idempotencyapi-designretries
  3. Distributed Systems advanced

    Design the connection layer for a chat platform holding tens of millions of concurrent WebSocket connections, where users belong to communities ranging from three people to a million. What are the main architectural decisions, and which one causes the most incidents?

    2 min answer websocketsgatewayshardingpresence
  4. Distributed Systems advanced

    Design the system that matches a rider request to a nearby driver. What are the hard parts?

    2 min answer uberdesignmatchinginterview
  5. Distributed Systems advanced

    DynamoDB has evolved through adaptive capacity, on-demand mode and global tables. Which failure mode did each address, and what does the sequence teach about designing partitioned systems?

    2 min answer awsdynamodbpartitioninghot-key
  6. Distributed Systems advanced

    Showing which users are currently online seems trivial and is one of the most expensive features in a chat product. Explain.

    2 min answer slackpresencefanoutcost
  7. Distributed Systems intermediate Multiple choice

    You move a user profile service to eventual consistency and support tickets start arriving: users update their name and the old one is still shown. Fix it without abandoning the architecture.

    2 min answer consistencyreplicationuxread-your-writes
  8. Distributed Tracing advanced

    A marketplace adopts distributed tracing but engineers rarely use it during incidents. What typically causes low adoption, and what makes tracing actually useful?

    2 min answer tracingsamplingadoptionexemplars
  9. Distributed Tracing intermediate

    A request takes 3 seconds. Every individual service reports healthy latency. How does tracing resolve this and what must have been instrumented?

    2 min answer tracinglatencysamplinginstrumentation
  10. Distributed Tracing advanced

    A team enabling distributed tracing must decide between head-based and tail-based sampling. Compare them, and explain what makes traces useful beyond a single request's timeline.

    3 min answer tracingsamplingopentelemetrytail-based
  11. Distributed Tracing advanced

    You are introducing distributed tracing across 40 services owned by 12 teams. Plan the adoption.

    2 min answer tracingopentelemetryadoptionsampling
  12. Distributed Transactions advanced

    A stay booking spans payment authorisation, calendar reservation, host notification and a guest confirmation email. A distributed ACID transaction is not available. How do you order the steps and what do you do when a compensation fails?

    3 min answer sagacompensationairbnbbooking