Microservices Architecture Interview Questions

Microservices Architecture Interview Questions
Q11. What do you mean by microservices architecture?
Microservices architecture, or microservices, is a software development approach

where large systems or solutions are composed of small independent applications or
(micro)services.
Microservices architecture is a special variant of service-oriented architecture where

there are loosely-coupled services that communicate with each other synchronously
or asynchronously.
When designing a microservice architecture, two types of aspects should be

considered. One of them is dividing the architecture based on business functionality
and business domains. The other thing is to divide the services by type.
Persistence, business rules, and some common logic should be divided into central
services. Then a common service framework should be built by composing these
central services in order to establish some common tasks. At last, there should be
some services implementing the business logic and APIs that are exposed.
Q12. What are the advantages of microservices architecture?
Microservices architecture offers various advantages over other approaches to

develop complex software solutions. Some of the main advantages of microservices
architecture are –
 Scaling: Microservices enable easy scaling of bottlenecks in an application.

 Reduced Complexity (for the developers): Developers only concentrate on the
complexity of their microservice.
 Manageability: Breaking up the application into several modules enables more
maintainable and manageable applications. Using containers enable quick and
easy deployment.
 Resiliency: When a small piece of service is down the overall application is not
affected.
 Quality: Breaking the applications by business capability enables the team to
focus on one topic. This results in high-quality and precisely implemented
business logic.
 Technology Enablement and Flexibility: Development teams are free to choose
cutting-edge technologies. Some microservices can use new technology stacks for
trial for example. The single modules can even be outsourced to third parties.
 Easy Integration and Communication: As most of the microservices architectures
use event-driven streaming technologies and asynchronous messaging systems,
integration is so easy compared to complex IPC protocols or service-oriented
architectures.
Related Article: Top Kafka Interview Questions
Q13. What are the disadvantages of microservices architecture?
Any architectural choice comes with its own tradeoffs and microservices architecture
is no different. Some of the disadvantages of microservices architecture that need to
be managed are –
 Design: Designing the overall architecture is harder than designing a monolith

application. Breaking the business logic and technical part into smaller
components needs both special expertise.
 Increased DevOps and Operations Complexity: When the number of
microservices is huge it is not easy to track the service status, their logs and the
cause of the problems. There should be special tools and frameworks in place to
solve these problems. Release, deployment, and scaling produce high DevOps
and operations overhead.
 Increased Resource Usage: As each individual service runs in its own context as a
standalone application, this consumes more memory and resource than a
monolithic application.
 Testing: Functional tests is not easy over a distributed deployment scenario. In
order to test the overall business case, you will need the all dependent
microservices.
 Network: Designing the network and implementing secure communications
between services is really complex.
Architects and leaders should be familiarize themselves with these tradeoffs and have
mitigation strategies in place before embarking on microservices journey.
Q14. What are some alternatives to microservices architecture?
Answer:
Microservices is one of the most popular architectural and development approaches

today due its various advantages but its by no means the only approach. Some of the
other software approaches are –
 Miniservices: The idea is created by Ross Garrett of Cloud Elements. This

approach is implementing one business function as a service. As opposed to
microservices, miniservices may share data and know each other by
communicating with HTTP REST APIs. Miniservices may run on the same
application server running as separate applications.
 Macroservices: This architecture is considered as large microservices built by
breaking the application into smaller monolithic applications. They share the
same data store and access to other services or processes. It is an intermediary
between monolithic applications and microservices where there is less complexity
than monoliths.
 Self-contained System (SCS): scs-architecture.org SCS is an architectural
approach that focuses on a separation of the functionality into many independent
systems, making the complete logical system a collaboration of many smaller
software systems. In this architecture, every component is an autonomous web
application where all data, the logic to process that data, and all code to render
the web interface is contained within the SCS. Data, business logic, and web
frontend are included in the single application which is owned by one team.
Q15. Why are organizations moving towards a microservices
architecture?
The current advantages of microservices enable companies to easily extend their

business capabilities at high velocity. A good microservices architecture is often
future proof to a greater degree than other approaches. Hence, as new emerging
technologies become mainstream, organizations have the flexibility to support these.
The microservices architecture also enables high resource utilization for both,
operations and development teams. Nowadays companies don’t want to invest in
huge server hardware where they are always in idle mode. In this architecture, the
organization’s application platform can deal with a growing user base and data.
Organizations can use their existing developers organized in smaller and agile teams
with improved productivity. This enables using the developers with different coding
languages and frameworks expertise for the project.
Organizations always want to minimize the downtime of their applications. As

microservices are loosely-coupled when they are down they don’t affect the whole
system.
By using microservices, the organizations can use DevOps principles effectively.

Accelerated release and deployment processes, reduced errors, and improved
software quality are some of the benefits that encourage organizations to move
toward the microservices.
Q16. What are the benefits of synchronous communication in

microservices architecture?
 Services can be built with simple and well-known protocols and frameworks such
as REST, gRPC etc.
 Tight runtime coupling ensures sequential access to services where there is a
business workflow implementation
 Each dependent service is called right after another in an ordered way
 Simple and easy request-response mechanism without the need for any broker
implementation
Q17. What are the challenges of synchronous communication in
 All services must be available for the duration of the main service call
 All services must respond promptly on time
 Performance issues may occur in case of complex business processes requiring
multiple calls one after the other
 Services and clients should discover the address of dependent services
Q18. What are the benefits of asynchronous communication in
 Asynchronous communication reduces the number of dependencies in a

microservices architecture
 Since messages can be processed asynchronously, it improves fault tolerance and
resiliency of the overall solution
 Makes it easier to horizontally scale the system
Q19. What are the challenges of asynchronous communication
in microservices architecture?
 There is a need for additional message broker or eventing platform component
 Implementing commonly required request-reply communication pattern requires
complex orchestration
 Debugging production problems can get difficult especially if context is not
properly maintained across microservice boundaries
 It is often difficult to track the status of complex business processes that rely on
many asynchronous calls between multiple microservices
Q20. What is idempotency and how does it relate to
A method (or API) is idempotent if it can be invoked multiple times with an identical
request without having adverse consequences.
In microservices architecture, it is recommended to implement retry mechanisms for
improved overall resiliency of the system. This however can lead to the invoked
microservice or consumer to receive more than one identical requests.
If the microservice is not built to be idempotent, this can lead to multiple copies of
the same transaction and/or other adverse effects (imagine money being withdrawn
twice from your account for a single transaction). It is therefore important for
microservice that expose APIs or consume messages to implement idempotency in a
microservices architecture.
Q21. What is service discovery and why is it important in

Service discovery is an important pattern in a microservices architecture.
This pattern allows services to dynamically locate and communicate with each other.
Service discovery is especially important in microservices architecture, where the

application consists of many small services that are deployed independently and
need to be able to dynamically discover each other in order to communicate.
Without service discovery, each microservice would need to know and maintain the
IP address of every other microservice in order to communicate – an approach that is
difficult to maintain and does not scale.

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Microservices Architecture Interview Questions

Q11. What do you mean by microservices architecture?

Microservices architecture, or microservices, is a software development approach

Microservices architecture is a special variant of service-oriented architecture where

When designing a microservice architecture, two types of aspects should be

Q12. What are the advantages of microservices architecture?

Microservices architecture offers various advantages over other approaches to

 Scaling: Microservices enable easy scaling of bottlenecks in an application.

Q13. What are the disadvantages of microservices architecture?

 Design: Designing the overall architecture is harder than designing a monolith

Q14. What are some alternatives to microservices architecture?

Microservices is one of the most popular architectural and development approaches

 Miniservices: The idea is created by Ross Garrett of Cloud Elements. This

The current advantages of microservices enable companies to easily extend their

Organizations always want to minimize the downtime of their applications. As

By using microservices, the organizations can use DevOps principles effectively.

Q16. What are the benefits of synchronous communication in

 Asynchronous communication reduces the number of dependencies in a

Q21. What is service discovery and why is it important in

Service discovery is an important pattern in a microservices architecture.

Service discovery is especially important in microservices architecture, where the

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