platform engineering

Account-per-team is the right instinct, but hand-rolled account setup drifts within a month. Vending turns governance into a pipeline with an SLA instead of a ticket queue.

Generation works when the inputs are genuinely data and dies when YAML grows loops. The line between encoding decisions and writing a worse programming language is where these interviews are actually scored.

Registries live or die on upgrade ergonomics, not on publishing features. Green example plans gate every tag, automation delivers upgrade PRs with plan output to consumers, and retirement is a census plus a date.

Tenancy is a dial from policy-based soft isolation to hard cluster boundaries with a virtual-control-plane middle ground. The scored answer picks by blast radius requirements and names what each model still leaves shared.

Cost per merge beats cost per minute. Attribute spend by pipeline, attack caches and matrix sprawl first, and know what self-hosted runners really cost.

Internal platforms hide a trap: the direct user is an engineer, but the real traffic belongs to their customers. Define SLIs from the consumer's vantage and turn the error budget into roadmap currency.

Threat modelling dies as a document ritual and lives as a design-stage habit. The answer that scores: tier reviews by blast radius, short sessions on RFCs, findings filed where engineers already work.

Adoption is a product problem: templates with tested safe defaults, guardrails that start in audit mode, and metrics on paved-road share. Remove reasons to leave the road rather than writing memos.

This is a platform-organization question disguised as infrastructure. Score comes from separating enforcement from ownership and explaining what stops the gateway becoming a smart ESB.

A platform question that is really a product question. The design is the easy half; the answer that scores explains how you would know developers chose it rather than were forced onto it.