Search the practice set
126 questions, 454 terms and 400 topics in 20 areas.
60 results for “Architecture Cost Modelling”
Architecture Cost Model
A calculation, made during design, of what an architecture will cost to run at expected and at peak volume.
Denormalisation
Deliberately duplicating data across records to make reads cheap, accepting the write-time cost of keeping copies in step.
Threat Modelling
A structured exercise that identifies what can go wrong with a design, before it is built, by walking the system's trust boundaries.
Uber's Domain-Oriented Microservice Architecture
After growing to roughly 2,200 microservices, Uber grouped them into domains behind gateways with strict dependency layering, to recover the comprehensibility that fine-grained de…
AI Gateway
A shared proxy in front of model providers that centralises routing, keys, quotas, caching, logging and safety policy.
Application Portfolio Management
Maintaining an inventory of every application with its owner, cost, business value and technical health, and using it to decide what to invest in, replace or retire.
Build vs Buy
The choice between developing a capability in-house and acquiring it, decided on differentiation and total cost rather than on feature lists.
Context Window
The maximum number of tokens a model can attend to in one request, holding the system prompt, history, retrieved context, tools and the answer.
Cross-Zone Data Transfer
Charges incurred when data moves between availability zones within a region — invisible on architecture diagrams and a recurring surprise on cloud bills.
Data Retention Policy
A defined rule for how long each class of data is kept, where, and what happens at the end of it.
Data-Flow Diagram
A diagram of how data moves between processes, stores and external entities, with trust boundaries drawn on it.
Database Index
A secondary structure that lets the engine find rows without scanning, trading write cost and storage for read speed.
Domain-Driven Design
Modelling software around the business domain, with boundaries drawn where the language of the business changes.
Egress Path Analysis
Tracing where data physically moves in an architecture, because transfer charges follow paths that appear nowhere on the diagram.
Human in the Loop
Requiring human review or approval at a defined point in an automated flow, chosen by the reversibility and cost of the action.
Indexing Strategy
Choosing the set of indexes a table carries by working backwards from its actual queries, and accepting the write cost that each one adds.
Managed vs Self-Managed
Trading control, portability and unit cost against the operational burden of running the thing yourself.
Model Router
Directing each request to a model chosen by the task's difficulty, cost and latency budget, rather than sending everything to the largest model available.
Multi-Cloud
Deliberately running across more than one cloud provider — a decision with a much higher cost than the lock-in it is usually adopted to avoid.
Non-Functional Requirement
A requirement about how well the system must behave rather than what it must do — latency, availability, throughput, security, cost.
Pragmatism
Preferring the simplest architecture that satisfies the requirements, and treating additional structure as a cost that must be justified.
Prime Video's Move Back to a Monolith
Amazon Prime Video consolidated a serverless, distributed audio/video monitoring service into a single process and reported a 90% cost reduction — the most-cited example of micros…
Prime Video reported a 90% cost cut by consolidating a serverless distributed service into one process. Does that mean microservices were the wrong choice, and what is the actual decision rule?
What actually happened The Prime Video Video Quality Analysis team's 2023 post describes an audio/video monitoring service built as Step Functions orchestrating
Security wants mandatory hardware keys for every login; the business says it will cost conversions. How do you resolve it architecturally rather than by picking a side?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you treat security as a fixed dial to be turned up, or as a risk proportionate design variable. Both stated positions ar
You inherit an estate of roughly 400 applications, no reliable inventory, and a mandate to reduce cost and risk. What do you do in the first ninety days?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you can sequence work at portfolio scale, and whether you go for evidence before strategy. This is the enterprise archit
Your services currently trust anything inside the VPC. A security review says move to zero trust. What changes, and what will it cost you?
What the interviewer is testing Whether "zero trust" is a concrete set of changes to you, or a slogan. What actually changes Workload identity. Every service ge
A team wants to build a new internal API on serverless functions. It will serve steady traffic of about 200 requests per second during business hours. What do you advise?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you can apply the serverless trade off to a specific workload rather than treating it as a default good or a default bad
Discord stores trillions of messages. What is their partition key, and what problem does the second half of it solve?
The key (channel id, bucket) — where bucket is a fixed time window. What each half does channel id matches the read pattern. Clients read messages within a chan
Architecture Cost Modelling
Pricing a design before building it, at expected and at ten times volume.
AI Cost Management
Token accounting, routing, caching and the context-window budget.
Cost & FinOps
General material on the economics of an architecture.
Cost Allocation
Tagging enforced at provisioning, and apportioning shared costs.
Cost Governance
Budgets, anomaly alerts, quotas and preventive policy.
Cost per Request
Fully-loaded per-unit cost, including the lines usually left out.
Cost vs Reliability
Each nine costing an order of magnitude, and pricing the failure instead.
Observability Cost
Telemetry bills, cardinality control and retention tiering.
Performance vs Cost
Buying latency, and knowing what the last millisecond is worth.
Relational Modelling
Normalisation, keys, constraints and the invariants a schema enforces.
Threat Modelling
Walking trust boundaries with STRIDE before anything is built.
Total Cost of Ownership
Lifetime cost including people, operations, upgrades and exit.
AI Observability
Logging prompts, versions, retrieved context and cost per request.
Application Portfolio Management
Inventory, ownership, cost and health for every application.
Build vs Buy
Differentiation, five-year TCO, and the exit cost of each option.
Cloud Governance
Preventive policy, tagging, quotas and cost and security guardrails.
Cloud Pricing Models
On-demand, committed and spot, and the crossover arithmetic.
Competing Consumers
Scaling throughput with instances, at the cost of ordering.
Compute Optimisation
Instance families, utilisation, and architecture that wastes less.
Data Warehousing
Dimensional modelling, star schemas and analytical workloads.
FinOps Practice
Inform, optimise, operate — and cost as a design-review criterion.
GraphQL
Client-specified queries, N+1 resolution and query-cost control.
Licence & Vendor Costs
Per-core, per-seat and per-environment terms that shape designs.
Managed vs Self-Managed
Trading control and unit cost against operational attention.
Model Selection
Capability, latency, cost and the evaluation that decides between them.
Network & Egress Costs
Cross-zone and cross-region transfer that appears on no diagram.
Polyglot Persistence
Choosing a store per workload, and the operational cost of variety.
Presenting to Executives
Decision first, cost, risk, and what happens if we do nothing.
Quality Attributes
Availability, latency, throughput, security, cost — expressed as testable scenarios.
Reserved & Committed Capacity
Committing the baseline, laddering terms, and expiry as a silent failure.