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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

92 questions in Cost & FinOps.

  1. Spot & Interruptible Capacity intermediate

    Which workloads genuinely suit spot or preemptible capacity, what must be true of them, and what are the failure modes of over-applying it?

    2 min answer spotpreemptibleinterruptiblecheckpointing
  2. Storage Costs intermediate

    A content platform's storage costs are dominated by content that is rarely accessed. How should tiering, lifecycle and access patterns be designed?

    2 min answer pratilipistoragetieringlifecycle
  3. Storage Costs beginner

    A lifecycle rule would move 400 million log objects averaging 6 KB each out of standard object storage into an archive class whose per-GB rate is about 95% lower. Roughly what does the move cost and what does it save per month at 2026 US list prices?

    2 min answer storagelifecyclearchivesmall-objects
  4. Storage Costs intermediate

    A video platform's storage grows monotonically while most content is watched rarely after its first weeks. What storage cost strategy applies, and what are the traps?

    2 min answer storage-costtieringlifecycleretention
  5. Storage Costs intermediate

    Storage spend is growing faster than data volume. What are the likely causes?

    2 min answer storagesnapshotstieringretention
  6. Storage Costs advanced

    The Hugging Face Hub held over 30 PB of models and datasets in Git LFS repositories where every new checkpoint version was stored in full. Sequence the move to chunk-level deduplicated storage under live traffic, and say where the saving actually comes from.

    3 min answer hugging facededuplicationgit-lfsstorage
  7. Total Cost of Ownership advanced

    A company evaluating whether to move a workload off public cloud computes a lower monthly infrastructure bill for owned hardware. Which costs does that comparison typically omit?

    2 min answer tcorepatriationhidden-costscapex
  8. Total Cost of Ownership advanced

    A platform team spends about 11% of its engineering capacity staying portable - an internal interface over the managed queue, nightly exports of vendor-held data, and an annual paper exit. Finance asks what that buys. What has the team actually purchased, and when is paying for it irrational?

    2 min answer tcolock-inoptionalityprocurement
  9. Total Cost of Ownership intermediate

    A repatriation business case sets this year's cloud invoice against a five-year amortised cost for owned hardware and shows a 40% saving. The arithmetic checks out and the staffing line is there. Review the model: what would you change, what would you leave alone, and which single line decides the argument?

    3 min answer tcorepatriationbuild vs buycapacity planning
  10. Total Cost of Ownership intermediate

    A team proposes self-hosting a managed service to save £80000 a year in licence fees. What do you add to their calculation?

    2 min answer tcobuild-vs-buypeople-costopportunity-cost
  11. Total Cost of Ownership advanced

    Google published its video coding unit at ASPLOS 2021 and reported 20x to 33x better compute efficiency than a well-tuned software baseline for workloads including YouTube transcoding. Custom silicon costs years and a team. What cost model justifies that decision, and where would copying it be a mistake?

    2 min answer youtubecustom-silicontcobuild-vs-buy
  12. Unit Economics advanced

    A database vendor removes its free tier to control cost. How should a platform team model the true cost of serving many tiny tenants, and which architectural choices change the economics?

    3 min answer planetscalefree-tierunit-economicsmulti-tenancy