Architecture interview questions

Questions

• Difference between the role of the Architect and the Tech Lead

  • Main concerns
  • What’s the most difficult aspect of the switch from TL to Sln Arch
  • Do you follow any particular mentoring strategy?
  • Do you establish guidelines, best practices? How? How to make sure they are followed?
  • How do you relate with Tech Leads in terms of the design/development process?

• Mention a couple of web Architecture Styles and describe them => check this (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/architecture/modern-web-apps-azure/common-web-application-architectures)

  • Monolithic
  • N-layers
  • Onion/Hexagonal/Clean Architecture (DDD/Dep Inv)
  • Vertical Slice Architecture (https://jimmybogard.com/vertical-slice-architecture/)

• What’s Event Driven Arch and it’s benefits (as opposed to request-driven)

  • Event vs Message
  • What’s Eventual Consistency? Have you been exposed to a situation where you have needed it, or considered it?
    • BASE (Basically Available, Soft-state, Eventually-consistent) as opposed to ACID (Atomic, consistent, isolated, durable)
  • Azure ServiceBus/RabbitMQ (or message broker) vs Kafka (Azure event hub), and where would you use each?
    • Any experience with Kafka? From your experience, any warning in its adoption?
  • How it relates to Microservices architecture?
  • Kafka experience?
    • describe a Kafka setup
      • environments approach
      • throughput
      • any cost-control strategy?
      • any scaling out strategy, ?

• What is uServices?

  • Difference with SOA?
  • Which are the benefits and trade offs?
  • Do you know DDD? How is it related to uServices. => Entity vs Value Object vs Aggregates
  • Have you been involved in migrating a monolith into microservice
    • any patterns, experiences?
  • Benefits of monolithic architecture

• Exercise: Authentication and Authorization in microservices * what’s your approach? * Relation between OAuth and OIDC * diferent scenarios covered by the OAuth flows => Authorization Code flow: server-server => Authorization Code Flow with PKCE(proof key for code exchange) => Resource Owner Password Flow

• Azure web app High Availability

  • Availability Zones (Zone redundant), Regions
  • Active-Active, Active-Passive
  • RPO
  • RTO
  • Deployment strategies
    • Canary deployment vs Blue/Green
    • How to implement it in Azure

• What is Cache

  • Difference with a DDBB
  • In Memory (not persisted) vs Persisted: trade offs
  • If cache is so fast, why not just use it as the ddbb storage directly?

• K8s/Docker

  • AKS: any experience?
  • Explain the setup: general pieces/responsibilities
    • service mesh?
    • security?
    • packaging (helm)

• Patterns

  • Refactoring patterns
    • e.g. refactoring monolith into uServices
  • Any anecdote with a particularly helpfull pattern in your personal experience?

• CI/CD

  • CI vs C Delivery vs C Deployment

• Non Functional Requirements

  • what are NFRs?
  • How do you manage them, govern them, document them in the process?

• Technical Governance

  • Documentation, how do you approach documentation?
  • What sort of diagrams do you use if any, and why? How do you organize them?

• Methodology

  • What’s agile methodology about? Can you resume in one sentence?
  • Your favorite/most important SCRUM ceremony?
  • In a project where there’s a PO, SM, Tech Lead and Dev Team, how would the life cycle or a requirement would be and how does the Architect comes into the picture

• Describe your favorite architecture design project