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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.

  1. Timeouts & Deadlines advanced

    A financial-data aggregator depends on hundreds of external banking APIs, some slow, some intermittently down, all with different behaviour. How should timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, caching, stale data and provider isolation interact?

    2 min answer plaidthird-partytimeoutscircuit-breaker
  2. Timeouts & Deadlines intermediate

    A service becomes unresponsive during an incident in a dependency it barely uses. Investigation finds the client had no read timeout. Explain the full mechanism.

    2 min answer timeoutspoolscascading-failure
  3. Timeouts & Deadlines advanced Multiple choice

    A travel search fans out to 40 suppliers with latencies from 80 ms to 4 seconds and varying reliability. Which timeout strategy should the aggregator use?

    2 min answer timeoutsdeadlinesaggregationexpedia
  4. Timeouts & Deadlines advanced

    Design the timeout configuration for a request that passes through gateway, orders, pricing and inventory. What numbers, and what rule generates them?

    2 min answer timeoutsdeadlinescascadingretries
  5. Timeouts & Deadlines intermediate

    Every service in your estate uses the client library's default timeout of 30 seconds. Why is that dangerous, and what would you set instead?

    2 min answer timeoutsresiliencecapacity