A site reliability engineer (SRE) is troubleshooting a microservices application where users report that requests are sometimes slow. The SRE has access to metrics showing that the CPU usage of the frontend service is high, but the backend service shows low CPU. The SRE suspects that the backend service is the bottleneck. Which additional data would best confirm this?

Logs from the frontend service showing error messages

Distributed traces showing the latency of each span in the request path

Network metrics showing the number of packets sent between services

Health check status of the backend service

A company is designing a microservices architecture. They have a legacy authentication system that is used by all services. The team wants to migrate to a new authentication system, but they want to do it incrementally without disrupting existing services. Which approach aligns with microservices principles?

Introduce an API gateway that abstracts authentication, and migrate services one by one to the new system

Update all services at once to use the new authentication system

Keep the legacy system and never migrate

Create a shared authentication library and force all services to use it

A team is containerizing a microservice and wants to ensure that the image is built with minimal size and no unnecessary tools, to reduce the attack surface. They also want to ensure that the image is reproducible. Which practice should they follow?

Use a large base image with all tools pre-installed for convenience

Use a multi-stage build with a minimal base image, and pin the base image digest

Build the image without a base image, using scratch, and include a shell for debugging

Use a base image with a tag like 'latest' to get the newest updates

A microservice is experiencing increased traffic during peak hours. The team wants to automatically scale the number of replicas based on CPU utilization, and ensure that new replicas are ready to serve traffic before they receive requests. Which set of Kubernetes features should they use?

Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) with a liveness probe

Manual scaling with a load balancer

Cluster Autoscaler with a startup probe

Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) with a readiness probe on the pods

A company is running a microservices application on Kubernetes. Services need to discover each other dynamically as pods are created and destroyed. The team also wants to distribute incoming traffic evenly across the available instances of each service. Which built-in Kubernetes mechanism provides both service discovery and load balancing?

External DNS with static IP addresses

Client-side service discovery with a custom registry

Manual endpoint configuration in each pod

GIAC Cloud Security Automation

Domain 4Objective 2

Microservices Architecture and Deployment GCSA Practice Questions (Page 2)

Part of the Container and Microservices Lifecycle domain, which makes up ~17% of our current practice bank. GIAC (SANS) does not publish an official question count, but from its 120-minute exam (~50–80 total, ~9–14 in this domain), expect 3–5 from this objective — we provide 37 practice questions to prepare you well beyond it. (estimate)

37questions here

8free pages

10concepts

Questions 6–10

6expert · hard
A site reliability engineer (SRE) is troubleshooting a microservices application where users report that requests are sometimes slow. The SRE has access to metrics showing that the CPU usage of the frontend service is high, but the backend service shows low CPU. The SRE suspects that the backend service is the bottleneck. Which additional data would best confirm this?
Select an answer first
7expert · hard
A company is designing a microservices architecture. They have a legacy authentication system that is used by all services. The team wants to migrate to a new authentication system, but they want to do it incrementally without disrupting existing services. Which approach aligns with microservices principles?
Select an answer first
8application · medium
A team is containerizing a microservice and wants to ensure that the image is built with minimal size and no unnecessary tools, to reduce the attack surface. They also want to ensure that the image is reproducible. Which practice should they follow?
Select an answer first
9application · medium
A microservice is experiencing increased traffic during peak hours. The team wants to automatically scale the number of replicas based on CPU utilization, and ensure that new replicas are ready to serve traffic before they receive requests. Which set of Kubernetes features should they use?
Select an answer first
10application · medium
A company is running a microservices application on Kubernetes. Services need to discover each other dynamically as pods are created and destroyed. The team also wants to distribute incoming traffic evenly across the available instances of each service. Which built-in Kubernetes mechanism provides both service discovery and load balancing?
Select an answer first

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Microservices Architecture and Deployment GCSA Practice Questions (Page 2)

Questions 6–10

A team is containerizing a microservice and wants to ensure that the image is built with minimal size and no unnecessary tools, to reduce the attack surface. They also want to ensure that the image is reproducible. Which practice should they follow?

A microservice is experiencing increased traffic during peak hours. The team wants to automatically scale the number of replicas based on CPU utilization, and ensure that new replicas are ready to serve traffic before they receive requests. Which set of Kubernetes features should they use?

Keep studying — Container and Microservices Lifecycle