Cloud Data Architecture and Tradeoffs Questions

Designing data architectures specifically for cloud environments and evaluating platform trade offs. Topics include when to use managed relational services, managed nonrelational services, cloud data warehouses, cloud object storage, lifecycle policies, cross region replication, data residency and compliance considerations, cost versus performance trade offs, managed service operational constraints, and strategies for high availability and disaster recovery in the cloud. Candidates should be able to compare cloud service options and justify choices based on reliability, cost, and compliance.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

A client has hundreds of data assets and asks why a metadata catalog is important. Describe the benefits for data discovery, governance, lineage, and self-service analytics, and list three practical steps to onboard teams to a new data catalog.

HardSystem Design

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Design a cost-aware tiering and retention policy that meets these constraints: 3-year legal retention with occasional audit restores, frequent access to most recent 90 days, cold retention must be low cost, and ability to place legal holds on individual datasets. Include restore procedures, access controls, and impact on query performance.

MediumSystem Design

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Sketch an analytics platform architecture that supports ELT pipelines, orchestration, lineage, monitoring, role-based access, and cost allocation tagging. Include components for landing, staging, curated datasets, BI, ML, and explain how teams interact with the platform.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

Some datasets must be strongly consistent while others can be eventually consistent in your global analytics system. Propose architectural patterns to reconcile inconsistencies between them for downstream reports, and explain how to surface or hide eventual consistency to different consumers.

MediumSystem Design

0 practiced

Design a cross-region replication strategy to meet these SLAs for a data lake: RPO 15 minutes, RTO 1 hour, consistent access to last 48 hours in both regions, and daily ingest 5 TB. Discuss replication mechanisms, metadata consistency, bandwidth cost, and failover process.

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