I have been on both sides of the cloud architect interview table. As a hiring manager at Lockheed Martin and Cigna Healthcare, I conducted over 200 technical interviews for cloud architecture roles. As a candidate, I went through interview loops at three Fortune 500 companies and two government contractors.
Each question below includes the answer I would accept from a senior candidate, with the depth and specificity that separates a hire from a rejection.
Foundational Architecture Questions
1. What is the difference between high availability and fault tolerance?
High availability minimizes downtime through redundancy. A system with 99.99% availability (52 minutes of downtime per year) is highly available. It may experience brief interruptions during failover but recovers quickly.
