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Quiz

2827 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 areas2827 Architecture Fundamentals91 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-Making101 The Architect's Meta-Skills92 Delivery & Release Engineering103 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience92 Testing & Quality Architecture102 Data Platform Architecture98 Streaming & Real-Time Data93 Data Governance & Semantics91 Frontend & Experience Architecture101 Edge, Mobile & IoT98 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture99 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk98
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

2827 questions.

  1. ETL & ELT advanced

    A daily pipeline has been producing wrong numbers for three weeks due to a logic bug. What must be true of the architecture for the fix to be a one-day job?

    3 min answer eltbackfillidempotencyairflow
  2. ETL & ELT intermediate

    A grocery platform ingests catalogue and inventory feeds from hundreds of retailers, each with different formats, quality and update frequency. Should transformation happen before loading or after, and where should data quality be enforced?

    2 min answer etleltdata-qualityingestion
  3. ETL & ELT intermediate

    A nightly pipeline failed halfway and the retry produced duplicate rows. Walk me through fixing this properly.

    2 min answer idempotencypipelinesbackfillcorrectness
  4. Event-Driven Architecture advanced

    A platform adopts event-driven architecture broadly and finds debugging and reasoning much harder. When is event-driven the wrong choice?

    2 min answer event-drivencouplingdebuggingobligations
  5. Event-Driven Architecture advanced

    A team proposes routing every internal workflow through an event-streaming platform because it is scalable and decoupled. What questions do you ask and when is a simpler mechanism correct?

    3 min answer event-drivenkafkaover-engineeringtradeoffs
  6. Event-Driven Architecture intermediate

    Before 2017 every consumer of published content at The New York Times integrated with each producing system's own API and bootstrapped its history by calling those APIs. The 2017 publishing pipeline replaced that with one Kafka log. What changed about the cost of adding the eleventh consumer, and about who pays for a backfill?

    3 min answer new york timeskafkaintegration costbackfill
  7. Event-Driven Architecture advanced

    Review this design. Every service publishes one event type per aggregate - OrderChanged carries the whole order document plus a changeType string. Eleven consumers subscribe and each begins with a switch on changeType, ignoring types it does not care about. What would you remove, what would you change, and what would you leave alone?

    3 min answer event-drivenevent granularitycouplingschema
  8. Event-Driven Integration intermediate Multiple choice

    A partner needs order-status changes within a few seconds. Their estate is behind a corporate proxy that blocks inbound connections, their security team will not whitelist your webhook IPs, and their integration is a single long-running job server, not a browser. Which delivery channel fits?

    3 min answer ssewebsocketswebhookspolling
  9. Event-Driven Integration advanced

    An e-commerce platform integrates order, inventory, payment, logistics and notification through events. Which events should be commands and which should be notifications, and why does confusing them cause outages?

    2 min answer event-drivencommandsnotificationscoupling
  10. Event-Driven Integration advanced

    An event-collection platform routes customer telemetry to hundreds of downstream destinations with different reliability. What delivery guarantees are achievable, and how should destination failures be isolated?

    2 min answer segmentdeliveryisolationdlq
  11. Event-Driven Integration advanced

    An order service publishes events consumed by six teams. Every consumer immediately calls back for order details. What is wrong and what do you change?

    2 min answer eventspayload-designcouplingversioning
  12. Event-Driven Integration advanced

    You operate webhook delivery for 50000 integrators. One endpoint is down for two days. Design the delivery system.

    2 min answer webhooksretriesisolationshopify