Back-End Development Microservices and Cloud Back-End Architecture 2

Question 1

What is serverless computing in the context of back-end development?

Accepted Answer

A cloud execution model where the provider manages server infrastructure and runs code in response to events, billing only for actual execution time

Answer

Running servers without an operating system

Answer

A development model where all logic runs in the browser

Answer

Deploying applications without a web server

Question 2

What is service discovery in a microservices architecture?

Accepted Answer

The mechanism by which services dynamically find and communicate with each other without hard-coded addresses

Answer

Automatically generating API documentation for services

Answer

Monitoring which services are healthy or unhealthy

Answer

The process of registering services with a central database

Question 3

What is a circuit breaker pattern in microservices?

Accepted Answer

A resilience pattern that stops sending requests to a failing service temporarily to allow it to recover

Answer

A security pattern that cuts off unauthenticated requests

Answer

A deployment pattern for zero-downtime releases

Answer

A database pattern for handling transaction failures

Question 4

What is the difference between horizontal and vertical scaling?

Accepted Answer

Horizontal scaling adds more servers (scale out); vertical scaling increases resources on existing servers (scale up)

Answer

Horizontal scaling upgrades hardware; vertical scaling adds more servers

Answer

Horizontal scaling is for databases; vertical scaling is for web servers

Answer

They are the same scaling strategy with different names

Question 5

What is Infrastructure as Code (IaC)?

Accepted Answer

Managing and provisioning infrastructure through machine-readable configuration files rather than manual processes

Answer

Writing application logic inside infrastructure configuration files

Answer

Generating code automatically from infrastructure diagrams

Answer

Using code to monitor infrastructure performance

Question 6

What is the role of an environment variable in cloud-deployed back-end applications?

Accepted Answer

To pass configuration values like secrets, database URLs, and feature flags to the application at runtime without hardcoding them

Answer

To define the geographic cloud region for deployment

Answer

To set the programming language version at compile time

Answer

To configure network routing rules for the cloud provider