Search the practice set
126 questions, 454 terms and 400 topics in 20 areas.
60 results for “Cloud Pricing Models”
Cloud Pricing Models
The purchase options for cloud compute — on-demand, committed use, and spot — which differ by up to 90% for identical hardware.
Cloud Exit Plan
A documented, costed assessment of what leaving a provider or service would require — increasingly a regulatory expectation and a better lock-in control than portability itself.
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.
Virtual Private Cloud
A logically isolated network inside a cloud provider, with an address range you control and explicit rules for what may enter and leave.
Account Vending
Automated creation of new cloud accounts pre-configured with the organisation's networking, identity, logging, guardrails and cost allocation.
Application Discovery
Establishing what applications exist, what they depend on, who owns them and whether anyone uses them — the step whose absence makes every later step a guess.
Autoscaling
Adding and removing capacity automatically in response to a demand signal, to track load without paying for peak all the time.
Availability Zone
One or more physically separate data centres inside a cloud region, with independent power, cooling and network, connected by low-latency links.
Backup Strategy
A plan for what is copied, how often, where to, how long it is kept, and — the part that decides whether it is real — how the restore is verified.
Blast Radius
The set of things that break, or become reachable, when one component fails or is compromised.
Blast Radius Reduction
The set of deliberate partitions — accounts, regions, zones, cells, tenants, deployment stages — that bound how far any single failure or compromise can reach.
Block Storage
A virtual disk attached to one instance at a time, presented as raw blocks and formatted with a filesystem — the storage databases and stateful workloads run on.
Burstable Instance
An instance that provides a low baseline CPU allocation and accrues credits while idle, spendable for short periods of full performance.
Capital One's Data Centre Exit
A major US bank closed all eight of its data centres and moved fully to public cloud, treating governance automation as the enabling technology rather than a constraint.
Causal Consistency
A model guaranteeing that operations which causally depend on one another are seen in the same order everywhere, while concurrent operations may be seen in any order.
Chargeback and Showback
Attributing cloud cost to the teams that generate it — either informationally (showback) or by moving it onto their budget (chargeback).
Connection Proxy
A pooling layer between applications and a managed database that multiplexes many client connections onto a small number of database connections.
Consistent Prefix Read
A guarantee that if a sequence of writes happens in a given order, a reader sees a prefix of that sequence — never an out-of-order subset.
Control Plane and Data Plane
The separation between the machinery that makes changes to a system and the machinery that serves its traffic.
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.
Durability vs Availability
Two different storage guarantees — whether data survives, and whether it can be reached right now — routinely conflated because both are quoted in nines.
An organisation is starting cloud adoption. Three teams want to deploy next month. What must exist first, and what can wait?
What must exist before anything reaches production Account structure. Separation by environment and by workload, because an account is the strongest isolation b
Design the network layout for a three-tier application in one cloud region. What are the decisions you cannot easily change later?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you know which network decisions are cheap and which are effectively permanent. This is a knowledge question with a clea
Design the timeout configuration for a request that passes through gateway, orders, pricing and inventory. What numbers, and what rule generates them?
The rule that generates the numbers One budget at the edge, decreasing inward, with room for a retry at exactly one layer. Start from what the caller will actua
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?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you can turn a blunt cost mandate into a portfolio decision with a stated risk, rather than either refusing it or over c
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?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you approach cost with the same rigour as latency, and whether you know where cloud money actually goes. How to find out
Uber indexes the world with hexagons rather than squares for surge pricing and dispatch. Why does the shape matter, and what is the general lesson?
Why the shape matters A square has eight neighbours at two different distances — four edge adjacent, four corner adjacent and further away. So "the neighbouring
You are asked to choose between a cloud data warehouse and a lakehouse for a new analytics platform. How do you decide?
What actually differs The gap has narrowed considerably, so the decision turns on fewer things than the marketing suggests. Format ownership. In a lakehouse, da
You are asked to lead a migration of 300 applications to cloud. What happens in the first ninety days?
Days 1–30: discovery, and the foundation in parallel Discovery from evidence, not interviews. Network flow logs for dependencies (the only trustworthy source),
You need to ship a rewrite of the pricing engine. Same inputs, same expected outputs, completely new implementation. How do you release it?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you know that release strategy is part of architecture, and whether you reach for verification techniques beyond "test i
A DR test fails: the secondary region cannot launch enough instances. What happened, and what standing checks prevent it?
What happened Service quotas in the secondary region are far lower than in the primary , because nothing has ever run there at scale. Quotas are per account and
A fleet of 200 instances averages 15% CPU and 85% memory. Finance wants a 40% cost reduction. What do you do?
The diagnosis The instance family is wrong. 15% CPU and 85% memory means the workload is memory bound running on general purpose or compute optimised instances,
A serverless API works in testing and fails under load with connection errors. The database is at 5% CPU. Explain and fix.
The mechanism Serverless functions scale by creating independent execution environments , each with its own process and its own connection pool. Two hundred con
A team tells you backups run nightly and are retained for 30 days. What is missing from that answer?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you know that a backup is not a control until it has been restored — one of the most reliable ways to find an unrecovere
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
Choose storage for four workloads: a Postgres data directory, user-uploaded images, a shared build cache, and seven years of audit records.
Postgres data directory — block storage It needs low latency random reads and writes and a filesystem, and it attaches to one instance. That is precisely block
Cloud Pricing Models
On-demand, committed and spot, and the crossover arithmetic.
Compute Models
Instances, containers and functions, and what each is priced and shaped for.
Cloud Architecture
General material on designing for cloud platforms.
Cloud Databases
Managed relational, key-value, document and analytical services.
Cloud Governance
Preventive policy, tagging, quotas and cost and security guardrails.
Cloud Migration
Per-application disposition, sequencing and the capability change underneath.
Cloud Storage
Object, block and file storage, and the access patterns each suits.
Communicating Threat Models
Making risk legible to people who will fund or accept it.
Consistency Models
Linearizable, sequential, causal, eventual, and the session guarantees between them.
Multi-Cloud
Best-of-breed, portfolio and portable — three very different costs.
Operating Models
How delivery, platform and governance functions fit together.
Reference Models
Shared conceptual frames — layering, tiers, viewpoints — and their limits.
AI-Era Architecture
General material on architecting systems that include models.
Architecture Cost Modelling
Pricing a design before building it, at expected and at ten times volume.
Autoscaling
Signals, delays and bounds — and the maximum that caps a runaway bill.
Availability Zones
The unit of correlated physical failure, and what zones do not protect against.
Backup Strategies
Scope, immutability, separation, and the restore drill that makes it real.
CQRS
Separating the write model from the read models that serve queries.
CQRS
Separate models for writing and reading, each optimised for its job.
Containers
Images, registries, immutability and the deployment model they enable.
Cost vs Reliability
Each nine costing an order of magnitude, and pricing the failure instead.
Disaster Recovery
Backup-restore, pilot light, warm standby and active-active postures.
Edge Computing
Moving compute towards the user, and what cannot follow it.