Search the practice set
126 questions, 454 terms and 400 topics in 20 areas.
32 results for “Platform as a Product”
Booking.com's Experimentation Platform
Booking.com runs over a thousand concurrent experiments and treats the ability to test any change safely as a platform capability rather than a product feature.
Product Thinking
Treating what you build as something with users, a value proposition and a lifecycle, rather than as a project that completes.
Data Mesh
An organisational approach that gives domain teams ownership of their analytical data as a product, with a self-serve platform and federated governance.
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.
Health Check
An endpoint the platform polls to decide whether an instance should be restarted or should receive traffic — two different questions needing two different checks.
Kubernetes
A container orchestrator that continuously reconciles the running state of a cluster towards a declared desired state.
Monzo's Microservice Estate
Monzo runs a bank on well over a thousand microservices, and the interesting engineering is in the platform and network isolation that makes that number survivable.
Paved Road
A supported, opinionated default way to build and run a service, made easy enough that teams choose it rather than being required to.
Replatform
Migrating an application largely as-is while making targeted changes to exploit the target platform — usually the best return per unit of effort.
Service Mesh
An infrastructure layer of sidecar proxies that handles service-to-service networking — mTLS, retries, timeouts, routing, telemetry — outside the application.
Workload Identity
Giving a running workload a cryptographically verifiable identity issued by the platform, so it obtains short-lived credentials without a stored secret.
eBay's Architectural Generations
eBay rewrote its core platform several times across its first decade, each time because the previous generation had hit a limit that could not be tuned away.
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 document collaboration product needs sharing with individuals, teams, and inherited folder permissions. Which authorization model?
The requirement is relationship shaped The questions this product must answer are: is this user a member of a team that has access to a folder that contains thi
A multi-tenant SaaS product has outgrown one database. You must shard. How do you choose the partition key, and what makes this decision so expensive to get wrong?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you exhaust cheaper options first, and whether you understand that a shard key is close to irreversible. First: do not s
A product catalogue page does 40,000 reads per second against a database that can serve 5,000. Walk me through the caching design, including what happens at 3 AM when the cache is empty.
What the interviewer is testing Whether you can design a cache including its failure modes, rather than saying "put Redis in front of it". The base design Cache
A startup asks you to architect their product "to handle millions of users". They currently have none. What do you actually build?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you can identify the real constraint. The stated requirement is scale; the actual constraint is survival, and an archite
Instagram served 14 million users with three engineers on Django and Postgres. What does that tell you about how to choose an architecture for a new product?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you can identify the binding constraint. For most products it is not traffic. What Instagram actually did Their 2011 pos
Product wants to add "customers who bought this also bought" using purchase history. What does privacy by design require here?
The first question is lawful basis, not architecture Purchase history was collected to fulfil orders. Using it for recommendations is a new purpose , and purpos
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 designing APIs for a platform with a web app, a mobile app, internal service-to-service traffic and third-party partners. What do you expose, and where?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you choose per constraint or adopt one technology as an identity. The wrong answers here are all defensible sounding and
You must choose a data store this week. The product team cannot tell you the expected query patterns or the growth rate. What do you do?
What the interviewer is testing How you behave when the information you would like does not exist — which is the normal condition, not the exception. Both "refu
Platform as a Product
Adoption earned rather than mandated, with an owner and a roadmap.
ML Platform
Feature stores, training pipelines, registries and deployment.
Platform Teams
Reducing other teams' cognitive load, measured by adoption.
Product Thinking
Treating platforms and services as products with users and a lifecycle.
Architecture Roles
Solution, enterprise, domain and platform architecture, and where each is accountable.
Centralised vs Distributed
Shared platform leverage against team autonomy.
Network Performance
Latency floors, bandwidth-delay product, and what no code change fixes.
Operating Models
How delivery, platform and governance functions fit together.
Subnetting
Tiering, zone binding, and sizing for an address-hungry platform.
Team Topologies
Stream-aligned, platform, enabling and complicated-subsystem teams.