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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.

  1. Compute Optimisation advanced

    A platform's accelerator fleet reports high utilisation, yet throughput per accelerator is far below the hardware's capability. Where does the waste usually hide?

    2 min answer compute-optimisationutilisationbatchingdata-pipeline
  2. Compute Optimisation advanced

    A team migrates its stateless serving fleet to an ARM instance family for roughly 20% better price-performance on paper. What has it given up, and when does that bill arrive?

    2 min answer arminstance-familybuild-matrixcommitments
  3. Compute Optimisation advanced

    Which compute cost lever has the largest payoff, and why is it the one teams attempt last?

    2 min answer computespotarchitecturecost
  4. Cost Allocation advanced

    A multi-tenant platform needs to know what each customer costs to serve. What makes this hard, and how is it approached?

    2 min answer cost-allocationmulti-tenancyshared-resourcesattribution
  5. Cost Allocation advanced

    Tag coverage is at 98% and teams still argue about their bill every month. Roughly a fifth of the spend is shared - the service mesh, the log pipeline, NAT gateways, the Kafka cluster, and the commitment discounts. How would you allocate it?

    3 min answer cost-allocationshared-costsshowbackcommitments
  6. Cost & FinOps advanced

    A design review presents a new event-driven platform. What cost questions do you ask before approving it?

    2 min answer finopscost-modelreviewegress
  7. Cost Governance advanced

    A commerce platform must control cost while guaranteeing capacity for peak retail events. How should governance handle the tension?

    2 min answer cost-governancepeakexceptionsbudgets
  8. Architecture Cost Modelling advanced

    A GPU platform must decide between holding warm capacity and accepting cold starts. How should the two be compared economically?

    2 min answer together-aimodalcold-startwarm-pool
  9. Architecture Cost Modelling advanced

    A video analysis pipeline splits streams into frames, analyses each, and aggregates. Built as serverless functions passing frames through object storage, it costs far more than expected. Diagnose.

    2 min answer amazonserverlesscostboundaries
  10. Architecture Cost Modelling advanced

    On 8 August 2024 Hugging Face announced it had acquired XetHub, a 14-person storage startup, describing it as its largest acquisition to that date. Continuing on Git LFS, or building content-defined chunking in-house, were the alternatives. What cost model separates the three, and where would copying this be a mistake?

    3 min answer build vs buydeduplicationstorage economicsacquisition
  11. Cost per Request advanced

    An inference platform's cost per request varies by two orders of magnitude between requests. What does that imply for pricing, capacity and engineering priorities?

    2 min answer cost-per-requestvariancepricingbatching
  12. Cost per Request advanced

    How do you build a cost-per-request model for a proposed architecture before writing code, and which cost terms are most often omitted?

    2 min answer prime-videocost-modellingunit-economicsdesign-review