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

86 questions in Networking.

Quiz

A design platform's shared template suddenly goes viral, and one asset receives millions of requests within minutes. How should CDN caching, origin shielding, request collapsing, stale-while-revalidate and cache warming work together?

A media company plans a global live event and its CDN partner cannot guarantee capacity in one region. How should multi-CDN steering, origin shielding and per-region bitrate caps combine — and how do you prevent steering oscillation?

A social platform serves large volumes of user-generated media with an extremely skewed popularity distribution and a cost-sensitive business. How should the delivery path be designed?

A video platform receives a viral upload generating millions of playback requests within minutes. How should edge caching, origin shielding, cache warming, request collapsing, transcoding priority and storage access interact?

After a content purge, your origin receives 400× normal traffic and falls over. The CDN is working as configured. What is missing and how do you fix it?

Design the playback path for a global video streaming service. What are the architecturally significant decisions?

Netflix places Open Connect appliances inside ISP networks and pre-positions content onto them during off-peak hours. Why is this fundamentally different from a conventional pull-through CDN, and what does it require from the content catalogue?

You put a CDN in front of your site. Cache hit rate is 12%. Origin load is barely reduced. Why?

A globally distributed API experiences a regional networking failure. How should DNS, health checks, traffic steering, connection draining, failover and consistency interact?

At 09:00 a team creates the DNS record for a new regional endpoint. It resolves from their laptops at once, but part of the fleet keeps getting NXDOMAIN until about 09:20 even though the record's TTL is 60 seconds. Why?

Why is DNS a poor primary mechanism for fast failover, and what should be used instead for a globally distributed service?

You use DNS with a 60-second TTL for regional failover. During a test, some traffic still hit the failed region 40 minutes later. Explain.