System Architecture & Design Flashcards
7 cards from real CDO practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 7 System Architecture & Design flashcards as text
A CDO wants business domains to own, publish, and serve their data as products while a central team provides self-serve platform tooling. Which architecture pattern does this describe?
Answer: Data mesh
Data mesh decentralizes data ownership to domains, treats data as a product, and relies on a self-serve platform with federated governance.
Under the CAP theorem, what must a distributed data store give up during a network partition if it chooses to remain available?
Answer: Strong consistency
During a partition, a system can guarantee only consistency or availability, so an available system accepts possibly stale reads.
Which pattern separates the model used to update data from the model used to read it, so each side can be optimized and scaled on its own?
Answer: CQRS
Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) uses separate write and read models, often linked by events.
In a microservices architecture, what is the recommended data ownership principle?
Answer: Each service owns its data and exposes it only through its API or events
Database-per-service keeps services loosely coupled, and other services reach the data only through contracts.
An event consumer may receive the same message more than once from a message broker. Which design property keeps duplicate processing from corrupting data?
Answer: Idempotency
An idempotent operation gives the same result no matter how many times it runs, so at-least-once delivery is safe.
Which architecture uses active metadata, knowledge graphs, and automation to connect distributed data sources without necessarily moving the data?
Answer: Data fabric
Data fabric is a technology-driven integration layer that uses metadata and automation to provide unified access across sources.
Which approach lets a distributed system keep data consistent across several microservices without using a distributed two-phase commit?
Answer: Saga pattern with compensating transactions
A saga runs a sequence of local transactions and undoes completed steps with compensating actions if a later step fails.
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