CDM Cloud & Containerization Flashcards

What is the purpose of a Kubernetes Namespace?

Answer: To provide logical isolation of resources within a cluster, enabling multi-team or multi-environment separation

Namespaces partition a Kubernetes cluster into virtual sub-clusters, allowing teams or environments (dev, staging, prod) to share infrastructure while maintaining resource and access isolation.

Which cloud-native design principle recommends that application state should not be stored in the application server process itself?

Answer: Stateless application design (12-factor app principle VI)

The 12-factor app's 'Processes' principle states that application processes must be stateless and share-nothing, with persistent state stored in backing services like databases or caches.

What problem does a service mesh (e.g., Istio, Linkerd) solve in a microservices architecture?

Answer: It manages service-to-service communication, providing observability, traffic control, and mutual TLS without changing application code

A service mesh injects sidecar proxies alongside each service to handle cross-cutting concerns like load balancing, retries, circuit breaking, distributed tracing, and mTLS encryption transparently.

In AWS, which service is the managed container orchestration offering that eliminates the need to manage Kubernetes control plane nodes?

Answer: Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service)

Amazon EKS is a managed Kubernetes service where AWS operates and scales the control plane, allowing teams to focus on running workloads rather than maintaining cluster infrastructure.

What is 'GitOps' and how does it relate to Kubernetes deployments?

Answer: An operational model where the desired state of infrastructure and applications is declared in Git, and automated agents continuously reconcile the live cluster to match that state

GitOps (popularized by tools like ArgoCD and Flux) uses Git as the single source of truth for cluster state, with controllers that automatically apply changes when the Git repo is updated.

What is the benefit of using a container registry in a CI/CD pipeline?

Answer: It provides a centralized, versioned store for container images that CI builds push to and deployments pull from

A container registry (e.g., Docker Hub, Amazon ECR, GitHub Container Registry) acts as the artifact repository for images, enabling versioned, auditable storage and controlled promotion between environments.