Technology
What this domain tests
Technology questions check whether an engineer understands the building blocks of systems well enough to choose and explain them: hardware, operating systems, networks, databases, security fundamentals, and emerging topics such as cloud and virtualization. The emphasis is conceptual understanding and trade-offs rather than memorizing product names. Candidates should be able to map a requirement to a suitable technology and explain the limits of that choice.
Concepts to master
Review the layered model of computing: hardware, OS, middleware, application. Know basic networking ideas such as IP addressing, subnetting purpose, DNS resolution, and the difference between TCP and UDP. Understand relational versus non-relational databases, normalization's purpose, and when indexing helps or hurts writes. Security fundamentals matter: authentication versus authorization, confidentiality, integrity, availability, encryption at rest versus in transit, and the principle of least privilege. Virtualization and cloud service models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) appear often; be able to say who manages what in each model.
Traps in questions
A frequent trap is conflating authentication with authorization, or encryption with hashing. Another is assuming more redundancy always means better availability without considering cost and complexity. Questions about cloud models often hide responsibility boundaries: in PaaS the provider manages the OS, not the customer. Watch for answers that treat a single tool as a complete security solution, or that ignore capacity limits such as bandwidth and storage growth.
Worked example
A team needs a managed runtime where they deploy only application code. Choosing PaaS is correct because the provider handles the OS and runtime patching, while the team still owns application security and data. Choosing IaaS would push OS maintenance back onto the team.
Rule of thumb: for any technology choice, state what problem it solves and what new burden it creates.