Microservices Interview Insights
Introduction
Microservices architecture is an increasingly popular approach to software development, characterized by a decentralized and modular approach to application design. In a microservices architecture, an application is broken down into small, autonomous services that are designed to perform a single business function. Each service is built and deployed independently of the others, allowing for greater agility, scalability, and fault tolerance.
While appearing for microservices interviews it’s very important to understand it thoroughly, below is the list of topics that I can think of. I hope it will be helpful
The list below is exhaustive and its not expected that you know everything in details but whatever you know that should be detailed
Microservices Architecture & principles
- Definition and advantages of Microservices architecture
- Principles of Microservices architecture
- Microservices architecture vs Monolithic architecture
- Decentralized data management
- Decentralized governance
- Decentralized communication
- Autonomous services
- Infrastructure automation
- Domain-driven design
- Fault tolerance and resiliency
Microservices patterns
- Service Registry
- API Gateway
- Circuit Breaker
- Service Mesh
- Sidecar pattern
- Strangler pattern
- Saga pattern
- CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation)
- Event Sourcing
- Bulkhead pattern
- Retry pattern
Microservices Communication
- Synchronous vs Asynchronous communication
- RESTful APIs
- Messaging systems (e.g. Kafka, RabbitMQ)
- Remote Procedure Call (RPC)
- GraphQL
- Event-driven architecture
Service Discovery and Service Registry
- Definition and principles of Service Discovery and Service Registry
- Service Discovery and Service Registry in microservices architecture
- Service Discovery and Service Registry tools (e.g. Consul, Eureka, ZooKeeper)
API Gateway
- Definition and principles of API Gateway
- API Gateway in microservices architecture
- Benefits and drawbacks of using an API Gateway
- API Gateway tools (e.g. Kong, Tyk, Apigee)
Scalability
- Definition and principles of scalability in microservices architecture
- Types of scalability (e.g. horizontal, vertical, functional)
- Load balancing and its role in scalability
- Scalability challenges and how to overcome them
Distributed Databases
- Definition and principles of distributed databases
- Types of distributed databases (e.g. sharded, replicated, shared-nothing)
- CAP theorem and its significance in distributed databases
- Distributed database tools (e.g. Cassandra, MongoDB, DynamoDB)
Microservices Security
- Security challenges in microservices architecture
- Authentication and authorization in microservices architecture
- Encryption and its role in securing microservices architecture
- Security tools (e.g. OAuth, JWT, SSL/TLS)
- Authentication and authorization
- Encryption
- Service-to-service communication security
- Access control and privilege escalation
- Threat modeling and risk assessment
Containerization
- Definition and principles of containerization
- Docker and its role in containerization
- Advantages of containerization
- Kubernetes and its role in container orchestration
Event-driven Architecture
- Definition and principles of event-driven architecture
- Publish-Subscribe pattern and its role in event-driven architecture
- Event-driven architecture in microservices architecture
- Event-driven architecture tools (e.g. Kafka, RabbitMQ)
Microservices Testing
- Unit testing
- Integration testing
- Contract testing
- End-to-end testing
- Chaos engineering
- Canary testing
- A/B testing
- Code coverage
- Mutation testing
Cloud Computing
- Definition and principles of cloud computing
- Cloud providers and their services (e.g. AWS, Azure, GCP)
- Cloud deployment models (e.g. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS)
- Cloud-native architecture and its principles
Microservices Deployment
- Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)
- Blue-Green deployment
- Canary deployment
- Rolling deployment
- Immutable infrastructure
- Docker and containerization
- Kubernetes and container orchestration
Microservices Monitoring and Logging:
- Monitoring strategies in microservices architecture
- Types of monitoring (e.g. health checks, metrics, tracing)
- Logging strategies in microservices architecture
- Log analysis and its role in microservices architecture
- Health checks
- Metrics and tracing
- Log analysis
- Distributed tracing
- Centralized logging
- Alerting and notification
Despite many challenges, while implementation, microservices architecture has proven to be a highly effective approach to software development. By breaking down large, monolithic applications into smaller, more manageable services, organizations can achieve greater agility, scalability, and fault tolerance, while also enabling more efficient development practices and a more modular approach to software design.
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