Solution Architect

Real-time Interview Question &

Answering Strategy
Architect IT Cloud

Architect IT Cloud @ 2023

 Question
An Auto parts retailer company of asset value $10 billion. They have 5 million customers. Their monthly
transactions are 7 million transactions. The 95% of their revenue are through their in-person store (Brick-and-
mortar) and 5% of the transactions are happening through online.

They are using all on-prem services.

Problem Statement: Since the maintenance and cap-ex charges are increasing, they wanted to migrate 100%
online.

As a solution architect, how do you provide your technical implementation and what are all the services that
you use to provide your solution.

Time for implementation: 3 weeks.

Provide your solution in 60 minutes.

Architect IT Cloud @ 2023

 Key points to remember
• Do not jump to the solution after understanding the question.
• List out all your questions to get clarification on this question to the interviewer and ask one
by one. Utmost clarity is more important than providing solution quickly.
• As a Solution Architect, you must think about the time and resources availability as well.
• You must provide the strategy of implementation.
• You must assess the skillset of the resources.
• Think about short term and long-term solution approaches.
• Always have more than one solution approaches and present as options to your customer to
pick.
• Rollout the solution in stages.
• Think about customer’s store locations and customer volumes in each region. Relate this with
the cloud regions by keeping latency in mind.
• Identify the high customer dense states.
• Start with the smaller number of transaction store as a safe approach or start with high
volume transaction store to go online so that you move big transaction volumes online
quickly. – The approach is up to the customer. But as a solution architect you must think in
these angles.

Architect IT Cloud @ 2023

Think about all the below points, ask question to
the interviewer and be clear on the ask.
Current System Details: Current state Architecture

• What is the real intention to move to cloud?

• Where the customer density is more, east, west or north or south? This is
required to choose your region and zone.
• What is the UI/UX technology being used?
• What is the middleware technology?
• Are they using microservices?
• What is the current DB tool and version?
• Are they using DB with HADR in the current state architecture?
• Is the application running in HA DR architecture?
• Is there any containerization being used? If yes, what is the container
orchestration platform being used?
• How the current system working. Is it cloud native? If yes, can plan for lift and
shift. If not, plan on the release wise development activities.

Architect IT Cloud @ 2023

 Additional Info about the question
Business impact
• What are the values the customer going to get when you implement this solution.?
• If this project fails, what is the recovery mechanism they have?
• Do they have backup and recovery mechanism existing in current infrastructure?
• What is their budget for migration?
• What is the return on investment the customer is expecting?
Skills
• What is the skill set of current resources in their organization?
• If the interviewer is saying you are the solution architect for this project. Ask yourself
……What value you can add if you are the solution architect for that customer?
• Is your organization ready to upskill the resources in cloud services?
Time
• 3 weeks is the given time. This is short time but you must come up with the reasonable
deployment timeline.
• What is the shortest path for implementation. Identify this with your project
management.
• How do you rollout the solution?
Architect IT Cloud @ 2023
 The Solution
Present options to solve the problem to your interviewer.

Option 1 - Lift & Shift with the existing application, create the required DB instances if the customer wants to keep
the data in cloud. If not plan for hybrid cloud approach by keeping the application in cloud and database on
your on-prem / private cloud.

Option 2 – Move everything to the cloud. Plan on app instances, machines with right configuration by comparing
with your on-prem configuration. Plan the DB instances, configurations, HA and DR strategies for all layers.

Option 3 – Containerization. In case of containerization, what are the benefits of going through Kubernetes and
OpenShift. Share the overview and easy of usage.

Provide a rough architecture diagram of Target System:

• Target system architecture diagram

• Start with region and zone
• List out the app engine and compute engine required – you don’t be required to remember the detailed configuration
• List out the DB services required for this if you are moving the DB to cloud.
• List out only key services required to solve this problem . All nice to have services like extended pipeline, the one can be achieved manually
for now considering the short time can be added as future works.

Architect IT Cloud @ 2023

Rough architecture diagram

Architect IT Cloud @ 2023

 The Solution cont.…
• How the target system differs from current.
Architecting Factors Legacy Architecture Target Architecture

High availability
Scalability
Resilience
Security
Maintainability
Usability

• Advantages of going with target system

Architect IT Cloud @ 2023