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

Serverless (like AWS Lambda or Vercel Functions) lets developers write functions that the cloud provider executes on demand, auto-scaling automatically with no server provisioning required.

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

Service discovery allows microservices to locate each other dynamically using a registry (like Consul or Kubernetes DNS), adapting to instances starting, stopping, or moving.

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

The circuit breaker monitors calls to a service and, after a threshold of failures, opens the circuit to stop sending requests, returning fallback responses and retrying after a timeout period.

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

Vertical scaling (scale up) means adding more CPU/RAM to an existing server, while horizontal scaling (scale out) means adding more server instances and distributing load across them.

Question 5

What is Infrastructure as Code (IaC)?

Accepted Answer

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

Answer

IaC tools like Terraform and AWS CloudFormation let teams define infrastructure (servers, networks, databases) in version-controlled code files, enabling reproducible and auditable environments.

Back-End Development Practice Test

Back-End Development Practice Test

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