Architecture Patterns and Tradeoffs Questions

Covers decision making between monolithic and microservice architectures and the broader architecture pattern trade offs that drive those choices. Candidates should explain when a monolith is appropriate versus when to adopt or migrate to microservices, describing technical and organizational criteria such as team size and structure, release cadence, performance and scaling requirements, and business domain boundaries. Expect discussion of trade offs including operational complexity, service independence, deployment velocity, testing and debugging difficulty, data consistency and transactions, latency, cost of infrastructure and monitoring, and security and governance. Evaluate knowledge of Conway law and how team boundaries shape architecture decisions. Be able to articulate migration strategies and concrete approaches such as the strangler pattern, bounded context decomposition, incremental service extraction, API versioning, database migration techniques, deployment and testing strategies to minimize disruption, rollout and rollback plans, and metrics for measuring migration success.