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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

82 questions in Cost & FinOps.

  1. Cost & FinOps intermediate

    Finance wants to cut cloud spend by committing to one-year and three-year reservations. What do you commit to, and what could go wrong?

    2 min answer finopscommitmentsreservationscost
  2. Cost & FinOps intermediate

    The cloud bill has tripled in six months while traffic grew 40%. How do you find out why, and what do you expect to find?

    2 min answer finopscostdiagnosisegress
  3. 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
  4. Cost Governance intermediate

    A team adopts an elastic analytical platform and receives a surprising invoice. What controls should have existed, and why do they get added late?

    2 min answer snowflakeelasticitygovernancequotas
  5. Cost Governance intermediate

    The cloud bill has doubled year on year while revenue grew 20%. The CFO wants a plan. What is your approach?

    1 min answer finopscostgovernancecloud
  6. 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
  7. 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
  8. Architecture Cost Modelling intermediate

    An architecture review must estimate the cost of a proposed design before it is built. What should the model contain, and what makes such estimates useless?

    2 min answer cost-modellingarchitecture-reviewestimationdrivers
  9. Architecture Cost Modelling beginner

    Every feature branch gets its own environment - one small always-on service, a managed NAT gateway, a load balancer and a small managed database. Roughly what does one idle environment cost per month at 2026 cloud list prices, and what does that imply for 60 open branches?

    2 min answer environmentsnat-gatewayfixed-costbeginner
  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. Architecture Cost Modelling intermediate

    The cloud bill doubled over three months with no traffic growth. Where do you look?

    2 min answer finopsdiagnosiscost
  12. Cost per Request intermediate

    A communications platform of the kind Twilio operates bills its customers per message. Most of what it pays per message goes to carriers rather than to its own servers. The team commits to halving infrastructure cost per message this year. What does that buy, and what does it give up?

    3 min answer unit economicscost of goods soldroutingmargin