blast radius

Spreading instances across availability zones is not the same as surviving an AZ failure. The candidates who know this can name the four coupling points that quietly re-unify your blast radius.

Stack boundaries follow blast radius and change frequency, not the org chart. The monorepo only pays for itself while a machine can answer, from a commit, exactly which roots need planning.

The security argument for GitOps is more specific than 'Git is the source of truth'. Pull deployment can remove cluster credentials from CI, and that single fact is most of the case.

Every candidate can define chaos engineering. Far fewer can say what they would break first, and almost none volunteer the abort condition, which is the thing that makes it a programme rather than an incident.