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

40 questions in Cost & FinOps.

Quiz

A cost-sensitive platform must choose between a highly available architecture and a cheaper one with a wider failure domain. How should the decision be made?

A team is asked to reduce infrastructure cost by 30%. How do you make the reliability trade-off explicit rather than accidental, and what should be cut first?

One architecture has excellent performance and mediocre reliability; another is reliable at substantially higher cost. How should the trade-off be evaluated?

What would it cost to move a service from 99.9% to 99.99% availability, and how would you decide whether it is worth it?

A live-streaming platform's largest infrastructure line item is data transfer. What architectural levers reduce it, and which are unavailable?

A microservice estate spread across three availability zones has a large unexplained network charge. Explain and fix.

An interviewer says - your platform team has found a change that would cut roughly £400000 a year of cloud spend and would take two engineers a quarter to deliver. Talk me through how you decide, and what you would want to know before you answer.

Cloud spend has grown 60% in a year while revenue grew 15%. The CFO wants a 30% reduction. How do you respond?

How would you make cost a routine engineering concern without slowing delivery?

A data tooling vendor licences its product per environment plus per named seat. The platform team is about to give every pull request an ephemeral preview environment containing the full stack. Which change keeps the licence bill flat without abandoning preview environments?

A per-core database licence makes horizontal scaling more expensive than vertical. How does that change your design, and would you challenge it?