Interview Q&A

Short answer: Serverless: Use serverless compute options like AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, or Google Cloud Functions for burstable or event-driven workloads to avoid idle time.

Explain a bit more

Spot Instances: Use spot instances or preemptible VMs for non-critical workloads that can tolerate interruptions, reducing costs significantly. Resource Scaling: Configure autoscaling policies to match service demand, ensuring you’re only paying for the resources you need.

Real-world example (ShopNest)

ShopNest splits Catalog, Cart, Order, and Payment into services so teams can deploy catalog changes without redeploying payments.

Say this in the interview

1. Define — one clear sentence (the short answer above).
2. Example — relate it to a project like ShopNest or your real work.
3. Trade-off — when you would not use it.

Short answer: The API Gateway can decode and validate JWT tokens to authenticate users and extract user roles for authorization. Example: Verify the signature of the JWT and check its expiry before forwarding the request to the microservices.

Real-world example (ShopNest)

ShopNest splits Catalog, Cart, Order, and Payment into services so teams can deploy catalog changes without redeploying payments.

Say this in the interview

1. Define — one clear sentence (the short answer above).
2. Example — relate it to a project like ShopNest or your real work.
3. Trade-off — when you would not use it.

Short answer: The API Gateway can aggregate data from multiple microservices and return a single response to the client, improving client experience. Example: An order summary could include data from the order service, inventory service, and shipping service.

Real-world example (ShopNest)

ShopNest splits Catalog, Cart, Order, and Payment into services so teams can deploy catalog changes without redeploying payments.

Say this in the interview

1. Define — one clear sentence (the short answer above).
2. Example — relate it to a project like ShopNest or your real work.
3. Trade-off — when you would not use it.

Short answer: Managing routing, security, and versioning for multiple services via a single gateway can become complex as the system scales. Mitigation: Use configuration management tools and declarative configurations to keep the gateway setup manageable.

Real-world example (ShopNest)

ShopNest splits Catalog, Cart, Order, and Payment into services so teams can deploy catalog changes without redeploying payments.

Say this in the interview

1. Define — one clear sentence (the short answer above).
2. Example — relate it to a project like ShopNest or your real work.
3. Trade-off — when you would not use it.

Short answer: Use custom headers to specify the API version. Example: X-API-Version: v1 or Accept: application/vnd.example.v1+json.

Real-world example (ShopNest)

ShopNest splits Catalog, Cart, Order, and Payment into services so teams can deploy catalog changes without redeploying payments.

Say this in the interview

1. Define — one clear sentence (the short answer above).
2. Example — relate it to a project like ShopNest or your real work.
3. Trade-off — when you would not use it.

Short answer: Common concerns like security, logging, rate-limiting, and authentication can be handled at the gateway, reducing redundancy in the services. Example: Handling authentication at the gateway means each individual microservice doesn’t need to implement its own authentication logic.

Real-world example (ShopNest)

ShopNest splits Catalog, Cart, Order, and Payment into services so teams can deploy catalog changes without redeploying payments.

Say this in the interview

1. Define — one clear sentence (the short answer above).
2. Example — relate it to a project like ShopNest or your real work.
3. Trade-off — when you would not use it.

Short answer: Ensure redundancy of services and resources, using auto-scaling and multi-region deployment to handle increased load and failure scenarios.

Say this in the interview

1. Define — one clear sentence (the short answer above).
2. Example — relate it to a project like ShopNest or your real work.
3. Trade-off — when you would not use it.

Short answer: Set timeouts on all inter-service calls to avoid hanging indefinitely. If a service call exceeds the timeout, it should return an error and trigger fallback mechanisms.

Real-world example (ShopNest)

If Payment is down, the Order service fails fast with a circuit breaker instead of hanging every checkout thread.

Say this in the interview

1. Define — one clear sentence (the short answer above).
2. Example — relate it to a project like ShopNest or your real work.
3. Trade-off — when you would not use it.

Short answer: response or route the request to an alternate service.

Real-world example (ShopNest)

If Payment is down, the Order service fails fast with a circuit breaker instead of hanging every checkout thread.

Say this in the interview

1. Define — one clear sentence (the short answer above).
2. Example — relate it to a project like ShopNest or your real work.
3. Trade-off — when you would not use it.

Short answer: to ensure service availability during high traffic or server failures.

Real-world example (ShopNest)

ShopNest splits Catalog, Cart, Order, and Payment into services so teams can deploy catalog changes without redeploying payments.

Say this in the interview

1. Define — one clear sentence (the short answer above).
2. Example — relate it to a project like ShopNest or your real work.
3. Trade-off — when you would not use it.

Short answer: failure, such as turning off analytics or limiting access to specific APIs while keeping core functionality intact.

Real-world example (ShopNest)

ShopNest splits Catalog, Cart, Order, and Payment into services so teams can deploy catalog changes without redeploying payments.

Say this in the interview

1. Define — one clear sentence (the short answer above).
2. Example — relate it to a project like ShopNest or your real work.
3. Trade-off — when you would not use it.

Short answer: default responses or alternative services can be used.

Real-world example (ShopNest)

If Payment is down, the Order service fails fast with a circuit breaker instead of hanging every checkout thread.

Say this in the interview

1. Define — one clear sentence (the short answer above).
2. Example — relate it to a project like ShopNest or your real work.
3. Trade-off — when you would not use it.

Short answer: the retry limit is reached.

Real-world example (ShopNest)

If Payment is down, the Order service fails fast with a circuit breaker instead of hanging every checkout thread.

Say this in the interview

1. Define — one clear sentence (the short answer above).
2. Example — relate it to a project like ShopNest or your real work.
3. Trade-off — when you would not use it.

Short answer: Use Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) to filter malicious or abnormal traffic.

Real-world example (ShopNest)

ShopNest splits Catalog, Cart, Order, and Payment into services so teams can deploy catalog changes without redeploying payments.

Say this in the interview

1. Define — one clear sentence (the short answer above).
2. Example — relate it to a project like ShopNest or your real work.
3. Trade-off — when you would not use it.

Short answer: If using cookies for session management, set the SameSite attribute to Strict or Lax to ensure cookies are not sent with cross-site requests.

Real-world example (ShopNest)

ShopNest splits Catalog, Cart, Order, and Payment into services so teams can deploy catalog changes without redeploying payments.

Say this in the interview

1. Define — one clear sentence (the short answer above).
2. Example — relate it to a project like ShopNest or your real work.
3. Trade-off — when you would not use it.

Short answer: Store sensitive data such as API keys, passwords, and tokens in environment variables or secret management tools (e.g., HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault).

Say this in the interview

1. Define — one clear sentence (the short answer above).
2. Example — relate it to a project like ShopNest or your real work.
3. Trade-off — when you would not use it.

Short answer: Assign roles to users or services (e.g., an admin role could have access to all endpoints, while a user role might only have access to read certain resources).

Say this in the interview

1. Define — one clear sentence (the short answer above).
2. Example — relate it to a project like ShopNest or your real work.
3. Trade-off — when you would not use it.

Short answer: Use JWT tokens in OAuth 2.0 for securing communication between microservices. Each service authenticates requests by verifying the token.

Real-world example (ShopNest)

ShopNest splits Catalog, Cart, Order, and Payment into services so teams can deploy catalog changes without redeploying payments.

Say this in the interview

1. Define — one clear sentence (the short answer above).
2. Example — relate it to a project like ShopNest or your real work.
3. Trade-off — when you would not use it.

Short answer: Use DNS-based service discovery (e.g., AWS Route 53, Consul DNS integration) that supports multi-region failover, routing users to the nearest region based on the DNS resolution.

Say this in the interview

1. Define — one clear sentence (the short answer above).
2. Example — relate it to a project like ShopNest or your real work.
3. Trade-off — when you would not use it.

Short answer: and track a cookie containing information about which backend service instance to route the request to.

Real-world example (ShopNest)

ShopNest splits Catalog, Cart, Order, and Payment into services so teams can deploy catalog changes without redeploying payments.

Say this in the interview

1. Define — one clear sentence (the short answer above).
2. Example — relate it to a project like ShopNest or your real work.
3. Trade-off — when you would not use it.

Short answer: instances of another service and their details (e.g., IP, port).

Say this in the interview

1. Define — one clear sentence (the short answer above).
2. Example — relate it to a project like ShopNest or your real work.
3. Trade-off — when you would not use it.

Short answer: Service discovery can fail if the service registry becomes unavailable. Solution: Use redundant and fault-tolerant service discovery setups with health checks, replication, and caching to minimize downtime.

Real-world example (ShopNest)

ShopNest splits Catalog, Cart, Order, and Payment into services so teams can deploy catalog changes without redeploying payments.

Say this in the interview

1. Define — one clear sentence (the short answer above).
2. Example — relate it to a project like ShopNest or your real work.
3. Trade-off — when you would not use it.

Short answer: order-service.my-namespace.svc.cluster.local).

Real-world example (ShopNest)

ShopNest splits Catalog, Cart, Order, and Payment into services so teams can deploy catalog changes without redeploying payments.

Say this in the interview

1. Define — one clear sentence (the short answer above).
2. Example — relate it to a project like ShopNest or your real work.
3. Trade-off — when you would not use it.

Short answer: Ingress controllers provide HTTP and HTTPS load balancing, routing external traffic to the appropriate services within the Kubernetes cluster. Popular ingress controllers like NGINX, Traefik, and HAProxy handle routing and load balancing across multiple service instances.

Real-world example (ShopNest)

ShopNest splits Catalog, Cart, Order, and Payment into services so teams can deploy catalog changes without redeploying payments.

Say this in the interview

1. Define — one clear sentence (the short answer above).
2. Example — relate it to a project like ShopNest or your real work.
3. Trade-off — when you would not use it.

Short answer: If one service instance becomes unavailable, the service discovery system should be capable of routing requests to other healthy instances. This could involve retry mechanisms or rerouting to secondary instances.

Real-world example (ShopNest)

ShopNest splits Catalog, Cart, Order, and Payment into services so teams can deploy catalog changes without redeploying payments.

Say this in the interview

1. Define — one clear sentence (the short answer above).
2. Example — relate it to a project like ShopNest or your real work.
3. Trade-off — when you would not use it.