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Module Quiz

Scenario-heavy, judgmental. There is a right answer for each, but the credit is in the reasoning. Complete after the concept and practice pages; before signing the PRR.

Current Module Questions​

Question 1: SLO Sanity​

Your capstone's webhook ingestion currently succeeds 99.2% of the time over the last 30 days, and traffic is about 200,000 requests per month. A team member proposes an SLO of 99.99%. Is this a reasonable SLO to commit to right now? Why or why not?

Question 2: Alert Discipline​

An operator says: "I added a new page-level alert on disk_used > 80% so we never run out of disk." Critique this decision and propose an alternative.

Question 3: Low-Traffic Alerting​

At capstone traffic of ~10 requests per minute, a 1-minute, "error rate > 1%" alert fires constantly on single failures. What multi-window rewrite is appropriate?

Question 4: Structured Log Judgment​

Given the log line:

"user alice (id 42) failed login from 10.0.0.5 because wrong password"

rewrite it as a structured log event with stable field names suitable for aggregation.

Question 5: Dashboard Minimalism​

Your current dashboard has 28 panels. Under the "three specific questions" rule (Healthy? Slow? Failing whom?), what should happen to a panel titled "Memory utilization (last 24h)"?

Question 6: Trace vs Log​

A user reports /webhook took ~900 ms and they are on provider=stripe. Logs show the request succeeded. Which signal answers the question "where did the 900 ms actually go?"

Question 7: STRIDE Walk​

For the flow [User] --signed JWT--> [API] --AWS SDK--> [DynamoDB], pick the STRIDE letter most likely to surface a real, unmitigated issue in a capstone and justify briefly.

Question 8: Secrets Scenario​

You discover a committed API key in a month-old commit on main. Name the first five actions, in order.

Question 9: Least-Privilege Diff​

Your api-runtime role currently has AmazonS3FullAccess. Describe the minimum experiment that proves whether its actually-used permissions are narrower.

Question 10: Failure Ranking​

You have time to prepare only three failures. Your candidates are: (a) region outage, (b) bad deploy, (c) leaked API key, (d) Postgres restart, (e) downstream API slow. Which three should you prepare and why?

Question 11: Retry Danger​

Why is retrying a non-idempotent payment POST with a 500 response dangerous, even if you use exponential backoff?

Question 12: Circuit Breaker Justification​

A downstream service has had three 30-second outages this week. Your retry policy is 3 attempts with backoff. Explain why a circuit breaker is still worth adding.

Question 13: Backup Reality​

A team says "we enabled RDS snapshots; backups are handled." Why is this answer insufficient for a PRR?

Question 14: Runbook Structure​

A runbook's mitigation section reads: "If errors are high, restart the service." Critique this and rewrite one step correctly.

Question 15: PRR Honesty​

You are walking the 18-item PRR. Item 15 ("backup + restore drill within 30 days") cannot be marked green because no drill was performed. A peer suggests marking it green anyway "since backups are enabled." Defend the correct action.

Interleaved Review Questions​

Prior Module Question 1 (S10 M03 -- Cloud Deployment & CI/CD)​

Why is an immutable, signed artifact in CI a prerequisite for most of this module's security items?

Prior Module Question 2 (S10 M02 -- Implementation & Testing)​

How do integration tests from the testing pyramid support the mitigation-decision table in Cluster 4?

Prior Module Question 3 (S9 M05 -- Cloud Security & Observability)​

Which S9 M05 primitive is the direct prerequisite for "structured logs at decision boundaries" in Cluster 2?

Prior Module Question 4 (S8 M04 -- Scale, Reliability, and Performance)​

Why does the "alert on the SLO, not everything" concept descend directly from S8 M04 work on symptom-based alerting?

Prior Module Question 5 (S6 M05 -- Distributed Systems Fundamentals)​

How does distributed-systems reasoning about partial failure inform retry-and-breaker decisions?

Self-Assessment and Remediation​

Mastery Level (90-100% correct):

  • Ready to sign PRR. Proceed to portfolio module.

Proficient Level (75-89% correct):

  • Revisit the cluster covering missed questions. Redo the matching kata. Then sign PRR.

Developing Level (60-74% correct):

  • Return to Cluster 1 and 4 concept pages with special attention to SLOs, burn rates, and failure ranking. Repeat the SLO/alert lab and the runbook kata before re-attempting.

Insufficient Level (< 60% correct):

  • Do not sign PRR yet. Reread the full module, repeat all four practice pages, and retake the quiz in a week. The PRR will fail under scrutiny at the current level of understanding.

Progression boundary​

Quiz performance calibrates retrieval and reasoning. It does not replace runnable work, changed-case transfer, the module assessment or required semester evidence. Consult practice calibration for the additional independent cases.