Microservices Service Discovery and Registry Questions and Answers

Question 1

A team is deploying microservices in a container orchestration environment like Kubernetes.
When a client service needs to communicate with a provider service, it sends a request to a stable virtual IP address managed by the platform.
The platform then routes this request to a healthy instance of the provider service.
Which service discovery pattern does this scenario describe?

Accepted Answer

Server-Side Discovery

Answer

Client-Side Discovery

Answer

Self-Registration

Answer

Third-Party Registration

Question 2

What is the primary responsibility of a service registry in a microservices architecture?

Accepted Answer

To maintain a dynamic, up-to-date list of available service instances and their network locations.

Answer

To route incoming client requests to the appropriate service instance.

Answer

To implement the circuit breaker pattern for fault tolerance.

Answer

To manage distributed transactions across multiple services.

Question 3

Which of the following is a key characteristic of the client-side service discovery pattern?

Accepted Answer

The client directly queries the service registry to get a list of service instances.

Answer

It simplifies client logic by offloading routing to a central load balancer.

Answer

The client application is completely unaware of the service registry.

Answer

It is the default pattern used by container orchestrators like Kubernetes.

Question 4

A potential disadvantage of the self-registration pattern is that it:

Accepted Answer

Tightly couples the service code with the service registry.

Answer

Requires a centralized registrar component to manage all services.

Answer

Cannot be used in modern containerized environments.

Answer

Is less resilient than third-party registration.

Question 5

An organization is building a microservices platform using a tool like Netflix Eureka. Each service instance, upon startup, is responsible for registering its own network location with the registry and sending periodic heartbeats to indicate it is healthy. What is this registration approach called?

Accepted Answer

Self-Registration

Answer

Proxy-based Registration

Answer

Third-Party Registration

Answer

DNS-based Registration

Question 6

In the context of service discovery, what mechanism is commonly used by a service registry to remove unhealthy or terminated service instances from its list of available endpoints?

Accepted Answer

A health check mechanism, such as TTL (Time To Live) heartbeating

Answer

API Gateway rate limiting

Answer

A distributed transaction coordinator

Answer

A publisher/subscriber message queue