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Quiz

2627 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 areas2627 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture77 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture78 Reliability & Resilience88 Observability81 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture85 Cost Architecture & FinOps82 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication91 Enterprise Architecture91 Legacy Modernization82 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

90 questions in Data Architecture.

  1. Cache Invalidation intermediate

    A product catalogue is cached with a 10-minute TTL. Merchandisers complain that price changes take 10 minutes to appear. What do you propose?

    2 min answer cachinginvalidationdesign
  2. Cache Invalidation advanced

    A retail platform's cache layer becomes unavailable during a high-traffic sale and all traffic lands on the primary database. What design prevents a cache outage from becoming a database outage?

    2 min answer nykaacache-failurestampedecoalescing
  3. Cache Invalidation advanced

    An edge platform can invalidate cached content either by short TTLs or by explicit purge on publish. Compare the two, and explain when a hybrid is required.

    2 min answer cache-invalidationpurgettledge
  4. Caching Strategies advanced

    A discussion platform has a handful of extremely popular threads receiving most reads and writes, and individual cache nodes become bottlenecks. How should hot-key detection, caching, coalescing, partitioning and asynchronous writes combine?

    3 min answer cachinghot-keyscoalescingreddit
  5. Caching Strategies advanced

    A popular cache key expires at peak. A thousand concurrent requests miss and hit the database simultaneously, and it falls over. Name three fixes and pick one to deploy first.

    3 min answer cachingthundering-herdstampedemeta
  6. Caching Strategies advanced

    A quick-commerce platform holds inventory across hundreds of dark stores that changes continuously. Which inventory data must be strongly consistent, which can be cached, and what should happen at checkout when the cached view is stale?

    2 min answer zeptoinventoryconsistencycaching
  7. Caching Strategies advanced

    A social platform has 1% of content receiving 90% of requests. How should adaptive caching, hot-key replication, request coalescing and partitioning work together?

    2 min answer sharechathot-keyskewreplication
  8. Caching Strategies advanced

    Chat clients download the full workspace user and channel directory on connect. For large workspaces this is slow and expensive. A CDN does not help. Why, and what does?

    2 min answer slackedgecachingapplication-aware
  9. Caching Strategies advanced

    Design read receipts and unread counts for a messaging product. Why is this harder than it looks?

    2 min answer messagingstatewrite-volumedesign
  10. Caching Strategies advanced

    Uber's Docstore (a sharded MySQL-backed document store) serves reads dominated by recently active trips. CacheFront put Redis in front of it. Why build the cache into the storage layer rather than leaving it to each caller, and how must invalidation, read-your-writes and post-failover warming behave?

    3 min answer uberdocstorecachefrontredis
  11. Change Data Capture advanced

    A downstream team needs to react to order changes. The order service can publish events, or they can consume CDC from its database. Which, and why?

    2 min answer cdceventscouplingintegration
  12. Change Data Capture intermediate

    A logistics platform needs its operational database changes to reach a search index and an analytics warehouse. An engineer proposes writing to all three from the application. What is wrong, and what is the alternative?

    2 min answer portercdcdual-writeoutbox