DevOps Flashcards

What is 'configuration drift'?

Answer: When environments diverge from their defined desired state over time

Configuration drift happens when running infrastructure gradually deviates from its declared configuration.

Why are 'health checks' important in load-balanced systems?

Answer: They let the load balancer route traffic only to healthy instances

Health checks allow the load balancer to stop sending traffic to unhealthy or failing instances.

What does 'immutable infrastructure' mean?

Answer: Servers are never modified in place; changes mean replacing the instance

Immutable infrastructure replaces instances entirely instead of modifying them, ensuring consistency.

In Kubernetes, what does a 'ConfigMap' store?

Answer: Non-sensitive configuration data decoupled from container images

A ConfigMap holds non-sensitive configuration data separately from the application image.

What is the purpose of 'feature flags' in continuous delivery?

Answer: Enabling or disabling features at runtime without redeploying

Feature flags let teams toggle functionality on or off at runtime, decoupling deployment from release.

What is the primary advantage of containerization over traditional VMs?

Answer: Lighter weight and faster startup by sharing the host OS kernel

Containers share the host kernel, making them lighter and faster to start than full virtual machines.

What does 'mean time to recovery' (MTTR) measure?

Answer: The average time to restore service after a failure

MTTR measures how quickly a team restores service after an incident or failure.