Microservices Architecture - Interview
Questions and Answers
1. What is Microservices Architecture?
Microservices architecture is an approach where an application is structured as a collection
of loosely coupled, independently deployable services, each responsible for a specific
business capability.
2. What are the key features of microservices?
- Independent deployment
- Decentralized data management
- Lightweight communication (usually HTTP/REST or messaging)
- Polyglot programming
- Fault isolation
3. What are the advantages of microservices?
- Better scalability
- Faster development and deployment
- Technology flexibility
- Fault isolation
- Easier maintainability
4. What are the challenges of microservices?
- Complexity in distributed systems
- Data consistency
- Debugging and testing
- Network latency
- Service discovery and configuration management
5. What is the difference between Monolithic and Microservices architecture?
Monolithic: all functionalities in a single codebase and deployment unit.
Microservices: functionalities are broken into small, independent services.
6. What is service discovery in microservices?
Service discovery is the process of automatically detecting services in a network. Tools like
Eureka and Consul help services find and communicate with each other.
7. How do microservices communicate with each other?
Microservices can communicate via REST APIs, gRPC, or messaging queues like RabbitMQ,
Kafka.
8. What is the role of an API Gateway?
API Gateway acts as a single entry point for clients. It handles routing, security, rate limiting,
load balancing, and aggregation of responses.
9. What is Circuit Breaker Pattern?
It is a fault tolerance pattern that prevents a network or service failure from cascading to
other services. Tools: Resilience4j, Hystrix.
10. What is service registry and discovery?
A service registry is a database of service instances. Services register themselves, and
clients query it to discover other services. Example: Netflix Eureka.
11. What is Spring Cloud?
Spring Cloud provides tools for building microservices, including service discovery, config
server, API gateway, load balancing, and more.
12. What is the role of Docker and Kubernetes in microservices?
Docker containerizes services for portability and consistency. Kubernetes orchestrates
these containers for deployment, scaling, and fault tolerance.
13. How do you handle configuration in microservices?
Use a centralized configuration server like Spring Cloud Config. Configs can be updated
dynamically using Git or Vault.
14. What is distributed tracing?
Distributed tracing tracks requests across services in a microservices architecture. Tools:
Zipkin, Jaeger, Sleuth.
15. What is eventual consistency?
In distributed systems, data may not be immediately consistent across services but will
become consistent over time. It’s a trade-off for availability and performance.
