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2988 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 areas2988 Architecture Fundamentals91 Distributed Systems111 Data Architecture100 Cloud Architecture97 Networking96 API & Integration Architecture97 Reliability & Resilience99 Observability92 Performance & Capacity Engineering100 Security Architecture105 Cost Architecture & FinOps102 Business Architecture103 Architecture Communication102 Enterprise Architecture100 Legacy Modernization102 AI-Era Architecture106 Software Architecture & Engineering93 Architecture Patterns94 Architecture Decision-Making101 The Architect's Meta-Skills102 Delivery & Release Engineering103 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience102 Testing & Quality Architecture102 Data Platform Architecture98 Streaming & Real-Time Data103 Data Governance & Semantics91 Frontend & Experience Architecture101 Edge, Mobile & IoT98 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture99 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk98
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

6 questions in Centralised vs Distributed.

  1. Centralised vs Distributed advanced

    A marketplace expanding across cities must decide what is centralised and what is devolved. What principle draws the line?

    2 min answer urban-companycentralisationautonomyconfiguration
  2. Centralised vs Distributed intermediate

    An interviewer puts this to you - six product teams each keep their own copy of the customer record, synced by events. Finance says the counts never match across three dashboards, and month-end reconciliation takes two people a week. Someone has proposed one authoritative customer service that every product calls synchronously. Talk me through how you would handle it.

    3 min answer data-ownershipavailability-compoundingread-modelsreconciliation
  3. Centralised vs Distributed advanced

    Eight product teams each call a shared entitlements service on every request. A four-person platform team owns it. It measured 99.95% availability over the last year and answers in 8 ms at p99. Leadership now wants feature-flag evaluation moved into the same service because it would be one place to change. What does that centralisation buy, and when does the bill arrive?

    2 min answer centralisationavailabilityfeature-flagsentitlements
  4. Centralised vs Distributed advanced

    Lyft open-sourced Envoy in September 2016 after running it internally, moving retries, timeouts, service discovery and network telemetry out of its services and into a sidecar proxy. Which problem did centralising the network layer solve that a shared client library could not, and what did the sidecar cost?

    2 min answer lyftenvoyservice-meshsidecar
  5. Centralised vs Distributed advanced

    When does a shared platform stop helping and start constraining, and what signal tells you?

    2 min answer platformcentralisationbottleneckautonomy
  6. Centralised vs Distributed intermediate

    When is a centralised architecture with a single relational database and vertically scaled application the right answer?

    2 min answer centralisedsimplicityscaleevidence