Unit 5: Overview of Container Orchestration and Microservices - Practice Quiz

1 What is the main purpose of container orchestration?

2 Which problem does orchestration primarily solve when running many containers?

3 Which of the following is a popular container orchestration platform?

4 In Kubernetes, what is the component that manages the overall cluster called?

5 What is a worker machine in a Kubernetes cluster called?

6 Which component stores all cluster configuration data in Kubernetes?

7 Which agent runs on each node and communicates with the control plane?

8 What is the smallest deployable unit in Kubernetes?

9 A single Pod can contain how many containers?

10 Which Kubernetes object manages the desired number of Pod replicas?

11 What does a Kubernetes Service primarily provide?

12 Why are Services needed when Pods already exist?

13 What is a key reason organizations adopt microservices?

14 In a microservices architecture, each service typically focuses on what?

15 What best describes a monolithic architecture?

16 Which is a common disadvantage of a monolithic architecture?

17 Which benefit allows scaling only the parts of an application that need more resources?

18 What does independent deployment in microservices allow teams to do?

19 Which of the following is a major cloud provider offering DevOps services?

20 What does the abbreviation GCP stand for?

21 A company runs 200 containers across 15 hosts. When one host fails, the containers on it must be automatically restarted elsewhere without manual intervention. Which capability of a container orchestrator directly addresses this requirement?

22 As container counts grow, teams struggle to manually balance load, place containers, and scale services. Which set of problems is orchestration primarily designed to solve?

23 In a Kubernetes cluster, which control plane component is responsible for assigning newly created Pods to suitable nodes based on resource requirements and constraints?

24 A developer changes cluster state via kubectl apply. Which component receives this request first and serves as the single entry point to the control plane?

25 Where does a Kubernetes cluster persistently store all of its configuration and state data as key-value pairs?

26 Two containers in the same application must share the same network namespace and communicate over localhost. What is the correct way to deploy them in Kubernetes?

27 Why is a Pod, rather than an individual container, considered the smallest deployable unit in Kubernetes?

28 A team wants to update an application from version 1 to version 2 gradually, replacing old Pods with new ones while keeping the app available. Which Kubernetes object and strategy fits best?

29 After a bad release, an operator wants to quickly return the application to its previous stable version. Which Deployment feature enables this?

30 A Deployment specifies replicas: 4. Two Pods are accidentally deleted. What does the Deployment's controller do?

31 Pods are frequently created and destroyed, so their IP addresses change. Which Kubernetes object provides a stable endpoint to reach a group of Pods?

32 An application must be reachable from outside the cluster through a cloud provider's load balancer. Which Service type is most appropriate?

33 How does a Service determine which Pods should receive its traffic?

34 A large team finds that a single shared codebase forces all developers to coordinate every release, slowing delivery. Which microservices benefit most directly addresses this pain point?

35 One microservice needs a NoSQL database while another performs best with a relational database. How does a microservices architecture accommodate this?

36 In a monolithic application, a small change to one module requires rebuilding and redeploying the entire application. What is the primary architectural reason for this?

37 A payments component experiences 10x more load than the rest of an application. In a microservices architecture, what scaling advantage applies?

38 A team deploys an update to the recommendation service without touching the checkout service, and users of checkout are unaffected. Which microservices benefit does this demonstrate?

39 If a service normally handling 500 requests/second must handle 2000 requests/second, and each instance handles 500 requests/second, how many instances are needed, and which property enables adding them?

40 A team wants a managed Kubernetes control plane so they do not have to operate master nodes themselves. Which pair of managed services fits this on AWS and Azure respectively?

41 A team runs 200 containers across 15 hosts manually with shell scripts. During peak load, some containers crash and traffic is unevenly distributed. Which combination of orchestration capabilities is most essential to directly resolve both the crash-recovery and the traffic-distribution problems?

42 In a Kubernetes control plane, if the etcd datastore becomes unreachable but existing worker nodes and their kubelets remain running, what is the most accurate immediate consequence?

43 You define a Deployment with replicas: 3 and a Service of type ClusterIP selecting those Pods. One Pod is deleted manually via kubectl delete pod. What sequence correctly describes the system's response?

44 A monolithic e-commerce app is split into microservices. The Orders service must confirm payment via the Payments service before finalizing. Which challenge is introduced by this decomposition that did not exist in the monolith?

45 A Pod contains two containers: an application container and a sidecar proxy. Which statement about their relationship inside the Pod is correct?

46 A microservices system autoscales only the Search service during traffic spikes while other services stay at baseline. Which benefit does this specifically demonstrate that a monolith cannot easily achieve?

47 Which control plane component is responsible for deciding which node a newly created Pod should run on, based on resource requests and constraints?

48 A Deployment update uses the default RollingUpdate strategy with maxUnavailable: 0 and maxSurge: 1 for 4 replicas. During the rollout, what is the maximum number of Pods (old + new) that can exist simultaneously?

49 An organization adopts microservices primarily to allow different teams to use different tech stacks. Which term best captures this specific advantage?

50 A team wants a managed Kubernetes control plane so they don't operate etcd or the API server themselves. Which mapping of managed Kubernetes services to cloud providers is entirely correct?

51 You need stable network access to a set of Pods from outside the cluster in a cloud environment, provisioning an external IP automatically. Which Service type is most appropriate?

52 Consider declarative orchestration where you specify desired state rather than imperative steps. What is the core mechanism an orchestrator uses to continuously enforce this?

53 For a small startup with 3 developers and an unproven product, which architectural choice is often recommended first, and why?

54 On each worker node, which component maintains network rules to route Service traffic to the correct backend Pods?

55 Team A deploys a bugfix to the Notifications service without redeploying Orders or Billing. Which property enables this, and what is a key prerequisite to keep it safe?

56 A Pod repeatedly enters CrashLoopBackOff. Which explanation best describes what this state indicates about kubelet behavior?

57 Conway's Law is often cited when justifying microservices. Which statement correctly applies it to service design?

58 A DevOps engineer wants a fully managed CI/CD pipeline service native to each cloud. Which grouping of native pipeline/build services is correct?

59 Which scenario represents the strongest justification for adopting a container orchestrator rather than plain Docker on a single host?

60 A system was split into microservices but every service shares one database and must be deployed together. This anti-pattern is best described as a: