COA Architecture & System Design 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which OpenStack service is responsible for providing bare-metal provisioning as a service?
- Nova
- Ironic (Correct answer)
- Zun
- Magnum
Correct answer: Ironic
Ironic is the OpenStack bare-metal provisioning service that manages and provisions physical machines.
Question 2: In a highly available OpenStack control plane, which component typically runs as an active-active cluster?
- Nova compute
- RabbitMQ message broker (Correct answer)
- Cinder volume backend
- Neutron DHCP agent
Correct answer: RabbitMQ message broker
RabbitMQ is commonly deployed as an active-active cluster to ensure message queue high availability across the control plane.
Question 3: What is the primary role of the Placement service (formerly part of Nova) in OpenStack?
- Scheduling VM snapshots to storage backends
- Tracking resource provider inventories and allocations (Correct answer)
- Managing floating IP address pools
- Coordinating live migration between hypervisors
Correct answer: Tracking resource provider inventories and allocations
The Placement service tracks resource provider inventories (CPU, RAM, disk, custom resources) and allocations to enable efficient scheduling decisions.
Question 4: Which topology would you choose to provide both north-south and east-west traffic routing entirely within the OpenStack network plane without relying on an external router?
- Provider network with flat mode
- Self-service (tenant) networks with a virtual router (Correct answer)
- VLAN segmentation with external switch routing
- SR-IOV passthrough with hardware offload
Correct answer: Self-service (tenant) networks with a virtual router
Self-service tenant networks with a Neutron virtual router handle both north-south (external) and east-west (inter-tenant) routing within OpenStack.
Question 5: In the OpenStack architecture, what does the term 'cell' refer to in Nova's cell architecture?
- A geographic data center region
- A partition of compute nodes sharing a local database and message queue (Correct answer)
- A security group applied at the hypervisor level
- An availability zone mapped to a specific storage pool
Correct answer: A partition of compute nodes sharing a local database and message queue
A Nova cell is a scalability partition consisting of compute nodes with their own local database and message queue, reducing load on the global API cell.
Question 6: Which OpenStack service should you use to deploy and manage containerized applications on Kubernetes clusters within OpenStack?
- Zun
- Magnum (Correct answer)
- Heat
- Tacker
Correct answer: Magnum
Magnum provides Containers-as-a-Service by provisioning and managing Kubernetes (and other COE) clusters on top of OpenStack infrastructure.
Question 7: When designing an OpenStack deployment for maximum resiliency, which of the following best describes the purpose of using multiple availability zones?
- To separate development and production workloads logically
- To isolate failure domains so a single hardware failure does not affect all instances (Correct answer)
- To reduce network latency between geographically distant users
- To enforce different billing rates for different tenant groups
Correct answer: To isolate failure domains so a single hardware failure does not affect all instances
Availability zones isolate failure domains — a power outage or hardware failure in one zone should not impact instances running in another zone.
COA Architecture & System Design 2
Which OpenStack service is responsible for providing bare-metal provisioning as a service?