Cloud & DevOps Practices Flashcards

What is a 'microservices' architecture?

Answer: An architectural style that structures an application as a collection of small, independently deployable services

Microservices architecture organizes an application as loosely coupled, independently deployable services each responsible for a specific business capability.

What is a 'service mesh' in a microservices environment?

Answer: An infrastructure layer that handles service-to-service communication, observability, and security

A service mesh (like Istio or Linkerd) uses sidecar proxies to handle load balancing, mTLS encryption, circuit breaking, and distributed tracing between microservices.

What is AWS Auto Scaling?

Answer: A service that automatically adjusts compute capacity based on defined scaling policies and metrics

AWS Auto Scaling monitors application metrics (CPU, requests) and automatically adds or removes EC2 instances, ECS tasks, or other resources to meet demand.

What is 'trunk-based development'?

Answer: All developers commit directly to a single main branch, keeping it always releasable

Trunk-based development requires developers to integrate code into the main branch at least once per day using small, incremental commits and feature flags.

What is a 'sidecar container' pattern in Kubernetes?

Answer: An additional container in a Pod that provides supporting functionality to the main application container

The sidecar pattern adds a helper container alongside the main application container in a Pod, extending its functionality (log shipping, proxying, secret injection) without modifying the app.

What does 'immutable infrastructure' mean in practice?

Answer: Servers are never modified after deployment — changes require replacing with new instances built from updated images

Immutable infrastructure means never patching or updating running servers — instead, a new server image is built, deployed, and the old one is terminated.