Cloud & DevOps Practices Flashcards
6 cards from real DevOps practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 6 Cloud & DevOps Practices flashcards as text
What is the purpose of a 'load balancer' in a DevOps architecture?
Answer: Distributing incoming traffic across multiple servers to ensure availability and scalability
A load balancer sits in front of a pool of servers and distributes client requests using algorithms like round-robin, least connections, or IP hash to ensure no single server is overwhelmed.
What is the 'cattle vs. pets' analogy in DevOps?
Answer: Servers treated as cattle are disposable and replaceable; pets are unique servers that are carefully maintained
The analogy describes a shift from treating servers as unique, irreplaceable pets to treating them as disposable cattle — numbered, automated, and easily replaced when broken.
What is AWS Fargate?
Answer: A serverless compute engine for containers that removes the need to manage underlying EC2 instances
AWS Fargate is a serverless container execution engine for ECS and EKS that provisions and manages the underlying compute infrastructure automatically.
What is 'infrastructure drift' detection?
Answer: Identifying when actual infrastructure state differs from the IaC-defined desired state
Drift detection tools compare the actual state of provisioned resources against the IaC configuration to find manual changes, unexpected modifications, or out-of-sync resources.
What is a 'circuit breaker' pattern in microservices?
Answer: A mechanism that stops sending requests to a failing service and fails fast instead of waiting for timeouts
The circuit breaker pattern monitors for failures and opens the circuit (stops requests) when a threshold is exceeded, preventing cascading failures and allowing the downstream service to recover.
What is 'continuous monitoring' in a DevOps context?
Answer: Automatically collecting, analyzing, and alerting on application and infrastructure metrics throughout the pipeline and production
Continuous monitoring provides real-time visibility into application performance, security, and infrastructure health across all environments from development through production.