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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 LLM Application Architecture.

  1. LLM Application Architecture beginner Multiple choice

    A document assistant sends a 30000-token prompt and streams about 400 tokens back. Time to first token is 4 seconds and the remaining 400 tokens arrive over the following 6 seconds. Which change most reduces the 4 seconds?

    2 min answer prefilldecodettftprompt caching
  2. LLM Application Architecture advanced

    A workspace product adds AI features over user content. Which architectural decisions dominate, and which are commonly deferred at cost?

    2 min answer llm-applicationpermissionslatencycaching
  3. LLM Application Architecture advanced

    An LLM chat product serves millions of multi-turn conversations. How do KV-cache reuse, prefix caching, continuous batching and session affinity change the architecture, and what breaks when a session lands on a different GPU?

    3 min answer character-aikv-cacheprefix-cachinginference
  4. LLM Application Architecture advanced

    The vLLM paper on PagedAttention (SOSP 2023) reports 2 to 4 times the throughput of the then state-of-the-art serving systems at the same latency, with larger gains for longer sequences and more complex decoding, from managing the key-value cache in fixed-size blocks like operating-system pages rather than as one contiguous per-request reservation. Its profiling of existing systems found only roughly 20 to 38% of key-value cache memory holding actual token state. What was the real constraint, what did the change buy, and where would copying the lesson be a mistake?

    3 min answer kv cachepaged attentionmemory fragmentationbatching
  5. LLM Application Architecture beginner Multiple choice

    Your chat endpoint streams tokens to the browser. A request fails after 300 of an expected 500 tokens are already on the user's screen. The team wants to apply the same automatic retry policy the rest of their API uses. Why is this different?

    3 min answer streamingretriesidempotencylatency
  6. LLM Application Architecture advanced

    Zoom publicly describes the architecture behind its AI Companion as a federated approach - its own models used alongside third-party frontier models, with work routed by task rather than every request going to a single provider. What problem does that structure solve that a single-provider design does not, and where would copying it be a mistake?

    3 min answer model-routingmulti-providercostevaluation