- Cracking the IT Architect Interview
- Cracking the IT Architect Interview
- Credits
- About the Author
- About the Reviewer
- www.PacktPub.com
- Preface
- 1. Architect Roles and Growth Paths
- 2. IT Strategy and Advisory
- IT strategy
- What is architectural vision and what information does it contain?
- Why do enterprises need to undergo transformation or modernization?
- What are the enterprise transformation challenges?
- What are the guiding principles for enterprise transformation?
- What is the overall architecture transformation approach and what are the benefits?
- What is the typical road map for engagement (emphasis is on the architectural phases)?
- What are the different frameworks/tools that are leveraged during strategy/advisory engagements? How do strategy frameworks help customers?
- What are the benefits of IT strategy engagements?
- How do you engage with a senior executive in the organization, for example, CxO or IT director?
- What is competitive analysis (aka market scan) and what are the benefits?
- What is Decision Matrix Analysis or Pugh Matrix Analysis?
- How would you engage with CxO to sell SMAC offering?
- How are projects prioritized as part of the IT roadmap?
- What does the company need to execute a business strategy?
- Summary
- IT strategy
- 3. Enterprise Architecture and Modernization
- Enterprise architecture
- What is the starting point for building enterprise architecture?
- Which stakeholders would participate in the enterprise architecture life cycle?
- What are architecture principles?
- Why do you need architecture principles?
- What are the most important artifacts of an enterprise architecture engagement?
- How does enterprise architecture support strategy and business goals?
- Explain a complex engagement in which you were the EA and the challenges you faced
- How would you mediate opposing views ?
- Explain where you applied strategic thinking to impact business results
- Can you provide an example where you drove a business initiative by promoting cross-organizational participation?
- How did you introduced a new standard and ensured its adoption?
- How to managed change in a complex environment for EA?
- How is EA ROI calculated? What are critical success factors for EA?
- What are the benefits of EA? What are the benefits of EA for existing IT versus greenfield initiatives?
- Why do you need a current state architectural blueprint?
- What are the common current state architectural blueprint mistakes?
- Describe typical TOC for an end state EA document created for your earlier engagement
- How do you evaluate architecture conforms to the enterprise architecture?
- What is an architecture vision and what are the stakeholder concerns?
- What are business capability maps ?
- How to build an enterprise taxonomy
- What are the secrets of successful enterprise architecture?
- What are the things your CIO can do to ensure enterprise architecture success?
- Why enterprise architecture engagements do not succeed
- What are the common mistakes made by enterprise architects?
- Is enterprise architecture dead?
- How do IT support new business initiatives?
- Architecture governance
- What value does enterprise architecture governance create?
- What are the architecture governance-critical success factors
- What do you understand by architecture governance?
- How can one tell if the enterprise architecture is comprehensive?
- What are the objectives for the governance boards architecture compliance reviews ?
- How is the architecture compliance review scheduled for the program?
- Who are the stakeholders for architecture compliance reviews?
- What does the architecture compliance review checklists consist of and what metrics are used to validate compliance?
- How can one evaluate if the solution conforms to enterprise architecture?
- Application architecture
- What is the methodology for developing application architecture ?
- What are the typical aspects that you would look for in an application architecture?
- How are tiers in an n-tier architecture plumbed together?
- How is message delivery guarantee to a source system?
- What is an enterprise resource planning application?
- What is customer relationship management? What are the benefits of CRM?
- Describes the challenges organization faces while incorporating CRM ?
- Describe the approach leveraged for the product selection phase of the IT architecture
- Describe what you understand by application performance management (APM)
- How do you arrive at the costing of a solution while building RFP responses?
- How to migrate an application from a traditional environment to the public cloud
- How can you overcome organizational silo issues?
- Business architecture
- Why do organizations need business architecture ?
- What does Business architecture cover ?
- Describe the Business architecture inputs/outputs ?
- What are the benefits of business architecture ?
- How does business architecture increase operational efficient and capacity for growth ?
- Explain difference between a business analyst and a business architect?
- What are the benefits of business-centric architecture versus technology centric architecture?
- How are business architecture and BPM-related?
- How to identify business processes organization's value chain?
- What are the core components of an enterprise?
- Which modeling tools or frameworks have you leveraged and what is the value of these tools to the EA discipline?
- Data architecture
- What are the Data principles ?
- Describe the data modeling process
- What are the key capabilities of data architecture?
- What do you understand by data quality? What are the various tools for data quality requirements?
- What are the different backup and recovery strategies?
- What are the KPIs/KRAs data domain ?
- What are various data synchronization/integration capabilities? What are the tools that support data integration?
- What are the different approaches for securing data?
- What is a data warehouse? What are the benefits of data warehouses?
- What is the differences between OLTP and OLAP ?
- What is the differences between big data and BI
- What are Hadoop and MapReduce ?
- What tools and techniques have you used to manage enterprise data and data architecture artifacts?
- What is ETL?
- Infrastructure and security architecture
- What are the principles of infrastructure domain?
- What does the infrastructure architecture cover?
- What is SSO?
- What is an authentication, authorization, and identification mechanism? What tools are used to provide such a capability?
- What is federated identity management?
- What are the various options for implementing security?
- Explain the public-key cryptography ?
- What is more important to focus on, threats or vulnerabilities?
- What do you understand by phishing, SQL Injection, Man-in-the-Middle, and cross-site scripting?
- What are the important security factors to consider for web applications?
- Summary
- Enterprise architecture
- 4. SOA and Integration
- Service-oriented architecture and Integration
- What are the key capabilities of SOA and the benefits of SOA?
- What are the key components of the SOA tiers?
- How do you calculate the ROI for SOA?
- What are the different SOA modernization strategies?
- What are SOA entry points? How do you start an SOA initiative? What are the SOA design principles?
- How does ESB enterprise service bus relate to SOA? What are the advantages and disadvantages of SOA?
- How do ESB fit in this landscape? What are the alternatives to ESB?
- What are BPM and BPEL?
- How do you handle security in an SOA project?
- What are the KPIs for SOA?
- Which approach works better for service identification? Top-down or bottom-up?
- What is service-oriented modeling and architecture methodology (SOMA)?
- How can services supporting long-running processes be scaled effectively?
- What is OSIMM?
- What is the difference between SOAP and REST?
- What are important constraints for a RESTful web service?
- How do you transform a business by leveraging SOA?
- What is the composition of a service?
- What are common pitfalls of SOA?
- Do we really need SOA?
- Explain the different levels of enterprise integration
- What is a web service? Are web services SOA?
- Web Services and SOA
- What are SOA patterns?
- Summary
- Service-oriented architecture and Integration
- 5. Solution Architecture and Design
- Solution architecture
- What are the most important technologies/specifications in Java EE?
- What are the improvements in EJB 3 and later versions of EJB?
- What do you understand by separation of concerns?
- What is session management?
- What is session tracking and how is tracking done in servlets for user sessions?
- What is the purpose of sessions and cookies, and what are the difference between them?
- How is the Java EE application session replication enabled?
- How do you version a service inventory?
- What is the key reason behind leveraging frameworks and libraries in application development?
- What is code refactoring?
- What is the difference between Object Oriented and Aspect Oriented programming?
- What do you understand by entity model/domain model?
- Describe the architecture of a medium-to-large scale system
- What are distributed databases?
- What is database sharding? Is database sharding the same as master-slave configuration?
- What is active and passive and active/active load balancing?
- What are the most important performance issues in Java applications?
- What are the tools for performance tuning and analysis of bottlenecks?
- How do you reduce DB communication and application bottlenecks?
- What are the options for making asynchronous calls within a Java EE 6?
- What are the various persistence mechanisms in JEE applications?
- What is the difference between performance, load, and stress testing?
- Explain use case diagrams
- Explain the difference between abstraction and encapsulation?
- Explain composition and aggregation and in class diagrams?
- Explain specialization and generalization?
- Explain the difference between compositions and inheritance?
- What are the benefits of the Spring framework?
- What is database deadlock and how can it be avoided?
- Explain the difference between the DOM and SAX parsers?
- What is connection pooling?
- What are the advantages of Hibernate?
- Why is String immutable in Java?
- Does garbage collection guarantee that the application will not run out of memory?
- Does Java support multiple inheritance and what is the difference between checked and unchecked exceptions?
- What is casting?
- What is a final variable? What is a final method? What is a final class? What is an immutable class?
- Explain thread states?
- Explain the advantage of collection classes over arrays?
- Why is Java considered a portable language?
- What is the difference between threads and processes?
- What is the difference between String buffers and String classes?
- What is ORM?
- What is the difference between a .jar, .war and .ear file?
- What is JSP?
- What is the ACID property of a system?
- What is shared nothing architecture? How does it scale?
- How do you update a heavy traffic site that is live with minimum or zero downtime?
- What are the important competencies and soft skills of architects?
- What are the modern practices an architect should be aware of?
- How do you ensure code quality?
- How do Agile and architecture go hand in hand?
- What are modern programming practices leading to good applications?
- What are the things that need to be considered when designing the web tier?
- What are the typical things you would need to consider while designing the business layer of a Java EE web application?
- What are the things that you would need to consider when designing the access layer (data layer) of the web application?
- How do traditional web applications work?
- Explain a web application implemented using Spring?
- What is a design pattern?
- What is a MVC design pattern?
- Can you list the advantages of the Spring MVC framework?
- What is JPA? How is Hibernate related to JPA?
- Which are the three main categories of design patterns?
- How do you maintain your skills and stay current with IT trends?
- Solution architecture - scenario Q and A
- Solution architecture
- 6. Emerging Technologies
- Big data
- Cloud
- What are the advantages of leveraging cloud computing?
- What are the deployment models in cloud? What are the key considerations for the cloud platform?
- Explaining the differences between clouds and traditional data centres
- Explaining the different modes of Software as a Service
- Describe the characteristics of cloud computing. What are the characteristics that separates it from traditional ones?
- What do I need to do to prepare for cloud?
- How does the cloud architecture overcome the difficulties faced by traditional architecture?
- What are the business benefits of the cloud architecture?
- What are the cloud service models in the cloud architecture?
- Describe virtualization and its benefits
- How enterprises benefit from private clouds
- Amazon Web Services
- What are the key components of AWS?
- Why is the isolation feature needed in Amazon Web Services?
- What is the function of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud?
- What are the different types of instances used in Amazon EC2?
- What are the provisions provided by the Amazon virtual private cloud?
- What is Amazon EC2 service? What are the features of EC2?
- What is an Amazon Machine Image and what is the relation between an instance and AMI?
- How the cloud users utilize services from a public cloud in an economical way
- Explain the key concepts of SaaS
- Explain the difference between grid and cloud computing
- Analytics
- Social media
- How do you use social media as a tool for customer service?
- How do you measure social return on investment?
- What are the benefits of a LinkedIn group against a LinkedIn page?
- How could you leverage YouTube in order to promote our brand and increase engagement?
- What are the two most important social marketing metrics a dealer should monitor regularly?
- Which social media channels do you recommend for the business?
- How can social media help create value for SEO?
- Explain the difference between SEO and SEM
- What is Facebook EdgeRank? Why is it so important to understand?
- What is your definition of social media marketing and digital marketing? How does that relate to our company?
- What is the first thing that you would do for the company in this position if we hire you?
- Enterprise mobility
- Summary
- 7. Methodologies, Frameworks, and NFRs
- Methodologies and frameworks
- What is the TOGAF framework?
- What do you understand by the TOGAF Architecture Development Method?
- What are the four TOGAF architecture domains?
- What is the TOGAF enterprise continuum?
- What are the different TOGAF certified tools?
- What is the Zachman framework?
- What is the difference between traditional methodology and Agile?
- How did you prioritize the requirements for a large program?
- What is a project charter? What essential elements should be captured in a project charter?
- What is reference architecture?
- What is benchmarking?
- What is the business value assessment technique?
- What is Continuous Integration? Why is Continuous Integration important?
- What is dependency injection?
- What is ITIL?
- Non-functional requirements
- What are the best practices to ensure good performance in an application?
- What are the best practices to ensure scalability?
- What are the best practices to ensure high availability?
- What are the best practices to ensure reliability in your application?
- What are the best practices to ensure maintainability?
- What are the best practices to ensure extensibility?
- What are the best practices to ensure high security?
- How is a session failover handled?
- How does your design handle transactions?
- How does the design handle authentication and authorization?
- What is application instrumentation (or profiling)?
- What are legal and regulatory considerations?
- What are Business Continuity and Recovery Considerations?
- How do we define and finalize NFRs for the projects or KPIs for the project?
- What is clustering and what are the benefits of clustering?
- What do you understand by distributed caching?
- What do you understand by the capacity planning?
- What are the different performance troubleshooting tools for Java application?
- What is load balancing? What are the different tools available for load balancing?
- What is the IP affinity technique for load balancing?
- Summary
- Methodologies and frameworks
- 8. Interview Preparation
The primary audiences for this title are the gamut of roles starting from IT consultant to chief architect who are responsible to lead and deliver strategic, tactical and operational engagements for fortune 100 customers worldwide. This title is for SMEs with background and competencies in IT advisory, designing and architecture and would like to gain advance and next level skills. The audiences for this book include:
- Chief and lead architects
- Enterprise architects
- Business architects
- IT strategy and advisory consultants
- Domains architects (infrastructure, data, application, business and security)
- Solution architects
- Technical architects/designers
- Students-IT and computer science streams
- Interview panels
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