Architecture Trade Offs and Cost Analysis Questions

Covers making and communicating architectural decisions that balance trade offs across cost, performance, reliability, speed to market, and organizational complexity. Topics include comparing architectural approaches and tool selections, estimating and explaining costs such as licensing, implementation, maintenance, compute, storage, and data transfer, and understanding how costs scale. Includes business driven framing of technical decisions, cloud economics including capital expenditure versus operational expenditure, return on investment analysis, and Total Cost of Ownership considerations. Candidates should be able to perform rough cost estimation, describe cost optimization strategies including rightsizing and managed service trade offs, and explicitly articulate constraints and choices when prioritizing features, timelines, and resources.