Quiz

2667 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 areas2667 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture78 Reliability & Resilience88 Observability81 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture95 Cost Architecture & FinOps92 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication91 Enterprise Architecture91 Legacy Modernization92 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

45 questions in Cost & FinOps.

Quiz

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?

A team's licence and managed-service costs are growing faster than its infrastructure. How should it decide what to bring in-house?

A platform's telemetry spend approaches its compute spend. Which reduction preserves diagnostic value, and which destroy it?

An observability platform's own telemetry costs have grown faster than its revenue. Which decisions reduce it without losing the ability to debug?

Datadog published Husky in 2022, a third-generation event store built on commodity object storage with FoundationDB holding the metadata, replacing an architecture backed by local SSDs. What forced the change, what did it buy economically, and what did it cost?

Telemetry is 28% of infrastructure spend on a contract billed per host and per custom metric, with 14 months left on a minimum annual commitment. The team wants to move to a self-hosted stack. Sequence the move under live traffic, and say when the saving actually starts.

Your observability bill is 25% of infrastructure spend. How do you reduce it without losing the ability to diagnose incidents?

A travel marketplace of Expedia's kind holds a three-year compute commitment covering 85% of its steady fleet. During a regional peak an availability zone runs short of its instance type and the autoscaler cannot launch. What happens to the bill and to the capacity?

An AI platform must secure accelerator capacity where supply is constrained and demand is uncertain. How should reservations, on-demand and spot be combined?

Finance proposes a three-year commitment covering 80% of current compute. Engineering is planning a container migration. Advise.

A team reduces its cloud bill 30% by removing a standby replica, then has an outage. What was wrong with the incentive structure?