Portfolio ↗

Quiz

2908 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 areas2908 Architecture Fundamentals91 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture87 Reliability & Resilience99 Observability92 Performance & Capacity Engineering100 Security Architecture95 Cost Architecture & FinOps102 Business Architecture103 Architecture Communication102 Enterprise Architecture100 Legacy Modernization92 AI-Era Architecture96 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

7 questions in Partition Keys & Ordering.

  1. Partition Keys & Ordering advanced

    A location pipeline must choose a partition key. What are the candidates, and what does each optimise for?

    2 min answer olapartitioningorderingskew
  2. Partition Keys & Ordering advanced

    A marketplace in the mould of Flipkart has an order-events topic with 24 partitions keyed by buyer id. One consumer per partition is now the throughput ceiling and the team wants 96 partitions. Per-buyer ordering is a hard requirement and six downstream jobs rebuild their state by replaying the topic. Sequence the change so each step is reversible and say where the point of no return is.

    3 min answer kafkapartitioningorderingmigration
  3. Partition Keys & Ordering advanced

    A stream requires ordering per user but not globally. How should partitioning be designed, and what breaks it?

    2 min answer partitioningorderinghot-keysrebalancing
  4. Partition Keys & Ordering intermediate

    A team must choose partition keys for an event stream. What does the choice determine, and what goes wrong when it is chosen carelessly?

    2 min answer partitioningorderinghot-keyparallelism
  5. Partition Keys & Ordering intermediate Multiple choice

    After scaling consumers from 3 to 12, downstream data shows updates applied out of order. What happened?

    2 min answer orderingpartitioningcorrectness
  6. Partition Keys & Ordering advanced

    Alibaba reported a peak of 583,000 order creations per second during Singles' Day 2020. Take that as the sizing input for a log-based order-event pipeline with per-buyer ordering. Roughly how many partitions does the order topic need, and which assumption dominates the error?

    2 min answer alibabapartitionscapacitypeak-event-readiness
  7. Partition Keys & Ordering advanced

    One customer generates 60% of your event volume. Their partition's consumer cannot keep up and the rest idle. What are your options?

    2 min answer skewmulti-tenancyscaling