Cost Aware Architecture and Design Questions

Focuses on how architectural decisions and design patterns affect operating cost and total cost of ownership. Interviewees should be able to reason about trade offs such as managed services versus self managed components, always on virtual machines versus event driven or serverless approaches, reserved versus on demand capacity, use of spot or preemptible instances, and multi region or edge placement. Candidates should demonstrate techniques for reducing cost through storage class selection and lifecycle policies, caching and batching, query and workload optimization, data transfer minimization, and workload isolation. The topic also covers modeling and communicating cost trade offs, estimating ongoing operating expense for alternative designs, and choosing architecture that balances budget constraints with reliability, performance, and engineering effort.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Explain how you would design autoscaling policies to be cost-aware: compare horizontal vs vertical autoscaling, scheduled vs reactive scaling, and provide examples such as scheduled scale-down during off-hours, scaling on queue length for batch workers, and maintaining a safe minimum capacity to protect SLAs. Describe cooldown, warm-up, and cold-start considerations.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

A company exports 20 TB/month from one cloud region to a partner in a different cloud/region. Describe how to model and reduce egress costs: options like peering/direct-connect, compressed transfers, delta-only syncs, hosting shared read-only buckets, or moving partners' compute to the same region. Discuss security, compliance, and operational trade-offs for each.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Define FinOps and describe the role a Solutions Architect plays in FinOps activities. Provide examples of tactical actions (tagging strategy, budgets, showback/chargeback, rightsizing recommendations) and how you would collaborate with finance and engineering to control run-rate.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Explain how introducing caching (CDN at the edge and/or application-level in-memory caches) reduces operating cost for a web application. Explain which cost buckets are reduced (origin compute, DB read/IOPS, egress), targets for cache hit rates to be meaningful, and the trade-offs introduced (invalidation complexity, stale data).

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Design an observability plan that balances debugging needs and cost for logs, metrics, and traces. Decide retention times, sampling rates, aggregation, alert granularity, and cold/archival storage strategy. Explain how these choices reduce ingestion and storage costs without losing key SRE signals.

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