CDM Cloud & Containerization Flashcards

In Kubernetes, what is the purpose of a Liveness Probe?

Answer: To determine if a container is still running correctly, restarting it if it fails the check

A liveness probe periodically checks whether a container's application is healthy; if the probe fails, the kubelet kills and restarts the container automatically.

What is the key difference between a Kubernetes Deployment and a StatefulSet?

Answer: StatefulSets provide stable network identities and ordered pod management, making them suited for stateful applications like databases

StatefulSets assign each pod a stable hostname and persistent volume, and they start/stop pods in order — critical requirements for databases and distributed stateful systems.

What is a Kubernetes ConfigMap used for?

Answer: Storing non-sensitive configuration data as key-value pairs that pods can consume as environment variables or files

ConfigMaps decouple configuration from container images, allowing environment-specific settings to be injected into pods without rebuilding the image.

Which cloud-native pattern involves running multiple identical instances of a service and distributing traffic across them to improve availability?

Answer: Horizontal scaling (scaling out)

Horizontal scaling adds more instances of a service behind a load balancer, distributing load and eliminating single points of failure for high availability.

What is a Helm chart in the Kubernetes ecosystem?

Answer: A package manager template that bundles Kubernetes manifests for easier deployment and versioning of applications

Helm charts package Kubernetes YAML templates with configurable values, enabling repeatable, versioned application deployments with a single `helm install` command.

In cloud DevOps, what is 'auto-scaling' and which metric is most commonly used to trigger it?

Answer: Automatically adding or removing compute instances based on demand, most commonly triggered by CPU utilization thresholds

Auto-scaling adjusts the number of running instances in response to load; CPU utilization is the most common trigger, though memory, request rate, and custom metrics are also used.