Search the practice set
126 questions, 454 terms and 400 topics in 20 areas.
60 results for “Cost Governance”
AI Gateway
A shared proxy in front of model providers that centralises routing, keys, quotas, caching, logging and safety policy.
Account Vending
Automated creation of new cloud accounts pre-configured with the organisation's networking, identity, logging, guardrails and cost allocation.
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.
Data Retention Policy
A defined rule for how long each class of data is kept, where, and what happens at the end of it.
FinOps
The practice of giving engineering teams visibility into and accountability for the cost of what they build and run.
Tagging Strategy
A defined, enforced set of metadata labels applied to every resource, without which cost allocation, ownership and lifecycle automation are all impossible.
Well-Architected Review
A structured self-assessment of a workload against defined pillars — operational excellence, security, reliability, performance, cost, and sustainability.
Architecture Cost Model
A calculation, made during design, of what an architecture will cost to run at expected and at peak volume.
Cost per Request
The fully-loaded infrastructure cost of serving one request, and the unit that makes architectural cost decisions comparable.
Cost vs Reliability Trade-off
The non-linear relationship between availability and spend, which makes each additional nine roughly an order of magnitude more expensive.
Egress Cost
The charge for moving data out of a cloud provider or across its zones and regions — usually the least-anticipated line on a cloud bill.
Total Cost of Ownership
The full lifetime cost of a capability, including the people, operations, upgrades and exit that a licence comparison leaves out.
Architecture Decision Log
The ordered, immutable collection of a system's decision records, read as a history rather than as a specification.
Architecture Decision Record
A short, immutable document capturing one architectural decision, its context, the alternatives, and its consequences.
Architecture Principle
A durable, agreed rule that constrains design decisions in advance, stated with its rationale and its implications.
Architecture Review Board
A forum that reviews significant designs against standards, risks and strategy before commitment.
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.
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.
Cardinality
The number of distinct time series produced by a metric, which is the product of the distinct values of all its labels — and the main driver of monitoring cost.
Chargeback and Showback
Attributing cloud cost to the teams that generate it — either informationally (showback) or by moving it onto their budget (chargeback).
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.
Cloud Pricing Models
The purchase options for cloud compute — on-demand, committed use, and spot — which differ by up to 90% for identical hardware.
Compliance Framework
A published set of control requirements an organisation is assessed against, which turns security posture into evidence somebody else will check.
Configuration Drift
Divergence between the infrastructure described in code and the infrastructure actually running, usually caused by manual changes.
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.
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
A dashboard has been wrong for three weeks. Nobody knows which upstream produced the table it reads. What is the governance failure, and what fixes it?
The failures, and there are three 1. No lineage. The question "which upstream produced this?" should be answerable in seconds by following a derived dependency
A design review presents a new event-driven platform. What cost questions do you ask before approving it?
What the interviewer is testing Whether cost is part of your architecture review or an afterthought handled by finance later, and whether you know the specific
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,
Equifax was breached in 2017 through a vulnerability with a patch available two months earlier. Beyond "patch faster", what architectural and governance failures does that imply?
The case, as publicly reported Apache Struts vulnerability CVE 2017 5638 was disclosed in March 2017 with a patch available. An internet facing dispute portal a
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
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 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 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
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
Cost Governance
Budgets, anomaly alerts, quotas and preventive policy.
Cloud Governance
Preventive policy, tagging, quotas and cost and security guardrails.
AI Cost Management
Token accounting, routing, caching and the context-window budget.
Architecture Cost Modelling
Pricing a design before building it, at expected and at ten times volume.
Architecture Governance
Preventive, automated controls rather than review meetings.
Cost & FinOps
General material on the economics of an architecture.
Cost Allocation
Tagging enforced at provisioning, and apportioning shared costs.
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.
Data Governance
Ownership, lineage, quality, catalogues and who may see what.
Observability Cost
Telemetry bills, cardinality control and retention tiering.
Performance vs Cost
Buying latency, and knowing what the last millisecond is worth.
Telemetry Cost
Observability bills that rival compute, and where to cut without going blind.
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 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.
Consensus Protocols
Raft, Paxos and quorums — what they guarantee and what they cost.