M5.4 module quiz
Ten questions. 80% to pass (8 of 10). Open book, unlimited retakes.
Answers are collapsed under each question. Answer first, then check.
Q1
Per-environment and per-team account axes differ in that per-environment:
A. Scales better as the number of teams grows over time
B. Is cheaper, since fewer accounts means fewer credentials to hold
C. Requires fewer credentials to be issued and rotated
D. Isolates blast radius by deployment stage rather than by ownership
Show answer
Correct: D. The hybrid, per-team crossed with per-environment, is the common end state and it multiplies account count accordingly.
Q2
The account axis should be chosen based on:
A. The org’s actual structure and where isolation genuinely matters
B. The cloud provider’s own recommendation in their guidance
C. Cost, since more accounts always cost more to run
D. Resource count, split evenly across the accounts
Show answer
Correct: A. Copying another org’s structure imports their organisational shape, and the boundary ends up in a place nothing in your org needs a boundary.
Q3
A shared-services account typically holds:
A. Production workloads that many teams depend on
B. Networking, CI, shared tooling and identity
C. Backups only, kept away from the live estate
D. Non-prod environments, kept out of the way
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Correct: B. Its cost then has to be attributed back to consuming teams, which is the shared-resource attribution problem in its most common form.
Q4
VPC endpoints reduce cost by:
A. Reducing the number of instances sitting behind the service endpoint
B. Compressing traffic before it leaves the VPC
C. Keeping traffic to provider services off the NAT gateway and public path
D. Caching responses closer to the consumer
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Correct: C. NAT gateway data processing is the charge being avoided, and it is frequently larger than the endpoint’s own hourly cost at any real volume.
Q5
The most common high-cost network anti-pattern is:
A. Using PrivateLink endpoints for every internal service-to-service call
B. Multiple VPCs peered inside one account
C. Transit Gateway between all the accounts
D. Routing internal service-to-service traffic over the public internet
Show answer
Correct: D. It pays internet egress rates for traffic that never needed to leave, and it is usually invisible because the bill line says egress rather than mistake.
Q6
Cross-region replication is worth its cost when:
A. Always, since resilience is never wasted spend
B. The RTO and RPO the business actually requires demand it
C. The provider offers a discount for the second region
D. Data volume is low enough to replicate cheaply
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Correct: B. Replication cost is continuous and the benefit is contingent, so the requirement has to be stated before the spend is justified.
Q7
Cross-account scheduling requires coordination when:
A. A dependency spans accounts, so stopping one breaks the other
B. The two accounts happen to sit in different cloud regions
C. Their credentials differ from one another
D. Always, since cross-account is never safe
Show answer
Correct: A. Resource groups spanning accounts are the mechanism, and the sequencing within them is what encodes the dependency.
Q8
Scheduling a shared resource that several accounts depend on is:
A. Recommended, since doing so maximises the total savings achieved
B. Impossible; groups cannot span accounts
C. Best avoided; the blast radius spans teams who did not agree to it
D. Automatic once the accounts are linked
Show answer
Correct: C. The saving accrues to one budget and the outage reaches several, which is the asymmetry that makes it a bad trade regardless of the arithmetic.
Q9
Signs that consolidation is needed include:
A. High per-account overhead relative to the isolation it provides
B. Running workloads across several different cloud providers
C. High total spend across the estate
D. Frequent deployments into each account
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Correct: A. The clearest form is a set of accounts nobody can name the isolation purpose of, which happens after a per-microservice or per-engineer expansion.
Q10
What should never be consolidated?
A. Non-prod environments only
B. Team sandboxes and demos
C. Regional accounts per zone
D. Production and non-production
Show answer
Correct: D. Merging them defeats the blast-radius argument that justified multi-account in the first place, and it makes non-prod scheduling a production risk.