Solution design

1.A ferry operator lists needs for a new booking system. Which item is a non-functional requirement?

2.In discovery, a grocery chain's IT lead says the new loyalty platform 'must be fast.' What is the best next step?

3.A hospital network wants a staff scheduling platform. The CIO sponsored the deal. Who else is most important to interview before drafting a design?

4.At a regional utility, finance wants monthly billing exports while operations wants meter data streamed in near real time. Each says theirs is the top priority and the budget covers one. What should you do?

5.Why is it useful to tag each requirement as must, should, or could during discovery?

6.A ticketing startup for a concert venue says average traffic is 50 requests per second. Which question matters most for sizing?

7.A county government sends a request for proposal with 300 requirement lines and two weeks to respond. What is the most useful first step?

8.Which statement is a testable availability requirement?

9.A logistics firm insists that the new design include 'a data lake.' What is the best response?

10.Why map the customer's current systems and data flows before proposing a target design?

11.A European payroll service requires employee data to stay in the EU. The preferred managed analytics service runs only in US regions. What is the right design response?

12.A design keeps a clinic's patient database in the required country. What is most often overlooked when checking data residency?

13.An online florist wants to take card payments while limiting its scope under the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). Which design choice helps most?

14.A trading-education firm wants users in Sydney and London to see each other's writes within 10 milliseconds, with strong consistency. What should you tell them?

15.A nonprofit food bank has a fixed yearly cloud budget and modest, steady traffic. Which design direction fits best?

16.An insurer's policy data lives on a mainframe that cannot be changed for two years. The new customer portal needs that data. What is the most realistic approach?

17.A home health agency must show who viewed each patient record. Which capability must the design include?

18.A defense contractor says the system must run on a network with no internet access. Which part of a typical cloud-native design is most affected?

19.A school district says all data 'must be encrypted with keys we hold.' You are unsure whether this is law or preference. What should you do?

20.Why list constraints separately from requirements in a solution design?

21.A customer asks for 99.9 percent monthly availability. Roughly how much downtime does that allow in a 30-day month?

22.A pharmacy chain says it can lose at most five minutes of prescription data in a disaster. Which target does this set?

23.A design for a tax filing service relies on nightly backups restored to a new region. The customer's recovery point objective is 15 minutes. What is wrong?

24.A request passes through three components in series, each 99.9 percent available. What is the approximate availability of the whole path?

25.A bike-share app runs web servers in two zones behind a load balancer, but both use one database instance in a single zone. What limits availability most?

26.An internal reporting tool at a furniture maker is used during office hours. The customer asks for 99.999 percent availability. What is the best response?

27.Compared with active-passive, what does an active-active multi-region design mainly add?

28.A credit union's design includes a standby region, but failover has never been tested. What is the main risk to raise?

29.What is the difference between a service level agreement (SLA) and a service level objective (SLO)?

30.A recipe site's pages call a recommendations service that sometimes fails. The customer wants pages to stay up regardless. What design helps most?

31.A grain co-op's scale houses record truck weights all day. The accounting system needs only the totals, once each night. Which integration pattern fits best?

32.When an order ships at an outdoor gear retailer, the email, loyalty, and analytics systems all need to know. Which pattern fits best?

33.A small lab partner can only send results as CSV files over SFTP. What should the design include for this file-drop integration?

34.Why should an event consumer that posts payments be idempotent?

35.A checkout flow calls a slow warehouse API synchronously to reserve stock, and checkout fails whenever the warehouse is down. Which change removes this hard dependency?

36.A design syncs 2 million contact records nightly into a SaaS CRM whose API allows 100 requests per minute. What should you check first?

37.A retailer wants its search index updated within a minute of product changes in a legacy database it is not allowed to modify. Which approach fits best?

38.Account events for a mobile bank must be applied in order per account, but not across accounts. Which design meets this?

39.Several partner systems will call a customer's new API. What should the design state up front to avoid breaking them later?

40.In an event integration for a parking app, some messages fail every time because of bad data. What should the design include?

41.A customer with an existing identity provider wants staff to sign in to a new SaaS app with work accounts. Which standards are typical?

42.A law firm uses single sign-on (SSO) for a new document platform, yet leavers still have accounts in the app weeks later. What should the design add?

43.A university wants faculty and students to get different permissions in a new course tool based on their directory groups. What is the usual approach?

44.A manufacturer's operations app will rely fully on single sign-on. What should the design also cover?

45.A nightly job at a freight broker must call the vendor's API with no user present. Which OAuth 2.0 grant fits?

46.After a merger, a retail group has two identity providers. Both staff groups need the same new app. What is a sound design?

47.A healthcare customer requires multi-factor authentication (MFA) for every user. Staff sign in through the customer's identity provider. Where should MFA usually be enforced?

48.A customer asks how fast a fired employee loses access to the new app after being disabled in their identity provider. Which design detail drives the answer?

49.A county library is moving its catalog and patron records to a new system. What is the first step in the migration plan?

50.A wholesale distributor can tolerate only a few hours of downtime but has 8 TB to move over a slow link. Which migration approach fits best?

51.How should a payroll migration confirm that data arrived correctly?

52.A clinic scheduler is cutting over to a new platform on Saturday night. What must the migration plan include before go-live?

53.A solar installer's old CRM stores each address as one free-text field. The new system needs street, city, and postal code. What should the migration plan do?

54.A gym chain has 15 years of check-in history, and the new system's storage is expensive. Which migration decision is sensible to propose?

55.Why run at least one full rehearsal migration before the real cutover?

56.During a phased migration, some branches of a farm credit lender use the new system while others still use the old one. What is the biggest design concern?

57.The delivery team wants a copy of a pet insurer's production data to test the migration. What should the plan require?

58.A parcel tracker stores 2 million scan events per day at about 1 KB each and keeps them for one year. Roughly how much raw storage is that?

59.A survey platform expects 8.64 million requests per day, almost all in an 8-hour window. What peak rate should you plan for at minimum?

60.A video course platform's estimate covered compute and storage, but the bills came in far higher. Which cost is most often missed in such estimates?

61.When comparing a managed database with self-hosting on virtual machines, what should a fair cost estimate include?

62.A customer wants one fixed number for monthly cloud cost, but usage is still unknown. What is the best way to present the estimate?

63.Your sizing for a ride-hailing dispatch service is based on vendor benchmarks. What should you recommend before the final commitment?

64.A back-office workload at a shipping broker runs at the same size all day, every day, for years. Which pricing choice usually lowers cost most?

65.A design is sized for a regional chain's current 40 stores. The sales plan says 120 stores in three years. What should the sizing section do?

66.A commercial database is licensed per CPU core. The design scales out to many small nodes at peak and keeps a standby. What should the estimate check?

67.A booking API handles 200 requests per second, and each request takes 0.5 seconds on average. About how many requests are in progress at once?

68.A dental group wants appointment reminders by text message. A mature service does this well, but their developers offered to build it. What usually favors buying?

69.A freight marketplace's pricing algorithm is the main reason customers pick it. Off-the-shelf tools cover only basic rules. What is the sound recommendation?

70.A buy option looks cheaper than building on license price alone. What is commonly underestimated?

71.A customer worries about lock-in with a managed message queue. What is a balanced way to address it?

72.A city transit agency needs a trip planner. Which option set gives the fullest build-versus-buy comparison?

73.A small museum wants a custom ticketing platform built and then run by its two-person IT team. Which concern should drive your recommendation?

74.Two stakeholders at an energy retailer argue build versus buy from gut feel. What helps them reach a decision?

75.A customer wants a proof of concept (PoC) for a document search tool. What should you agree on before it starts?

76.Which is the best exit criterion for a proof of concept of a fraud scoring service?

77.Midway through a two-week proof of concept, a property management customer asks to add three new integrations. What should you do?

78.A design for a seed bank's inventory system has many parts. One, reading an old barcode format, has never been done before. What should the proof of concept focus on?

79.How does a pilot differ from a proof of concept?

80.A proof of concept for an insurer missed one of four exit criteria, a throughput target. What should you do?

81.A proof of concept used hard-coded credentials and skipped high availability to save time. What should its report make clear?

82.Why ask to run a proof of concept on a sample of the customer's real data rather than vendor demo data?

83.What is the purpose of an assumptions list in a solution design?

84.Which is the most useful way to record a risk in a design document?

85.Your design for a water utility assumed its meter vendor offers an API. You learn the vendor only sends nightly files. What is the right step?

86.Why keep architecture decision records for key choices in a customer design?

87.A design for a hotel group depends on its network team opening firewall routes before week three. What should you do with this dependency?

88.A design relies on a small third-party library with a single maintainer. Which response is a mitigation rather than acceptance?

89.Why should a solution design state what is out of scope?

90.A design must go to a customer tomorrow, but two questions about peak volume are still open. What is the best approach?

91.You are presenting a design to a toy company's chief financial officer. What should the presentation lead with?

92.The customer's lead engineers will review your design. What do they most need to see?

93.When presenting a design choice, why show two or three options instead of only one?

94.A claims processing firm must choose between single-region at lower cost and multi-region at double the cost. How should you frame the choice?

95.In a design review at a shipping line, a senior engineer says your queue choice will not scale. You are not sure. What do you do?

96.Why prepare architecture diagrams at more than one level, such as context, container, and component views?

97.After you present three options, a customer asks, 'Which one would you pick?' What is the best response?

98.A business sponsor at a dairy cooperative looks lost when you mention eventual consistency. What is the best fix?

99.A prospect requires on-premises installation. Your product is cloud only. What should you do?

100.A product cannot export audit logs in the format a bank's monitoring tool needs. A small converter service could fill the gap. What must you make clear?

101.Sales wants you to tell a customer that a missing feature ships next quarter. Product management has not committed to it. What do you do?

102.A customer requires sub-second refresh on a dashboard that staff check twice a day. The product refreshes every minute. What is the best next step?

103.A product gap can be filled by a partner product or by custom code. What should drive the recommendation?

104.A defense customer requires a security accreditation your product lacks and will not get for years. What is the right move?

105.What should a handoff package from the solutions architect to the delivery team include?

106.During pre-sale, you told a customer that reports would load in under three seconds. Why must this appear in the handoff?

107.What is the most effective way to hand off a large hospital project from pre-sale to delivery?

108.How should a reference architecture be used when designing for a specific customer?

109.A language-learning app serves audio clips from one region to users in many countries. Distant users report slow loads. What helps most?

110.A SaaS vendor serves many small firms from one shared database. A large new customer demands full separation of its data. Which option addresses this directly?