A company is deploying a new version of a user-facing microservice. They want to minimize the risk of a bad release affecting all users, but they also need to be able to compare the performance of the new version against the old version. They have a monitoring system that can track error rates and latency. Which deployment strategy should they use?

Canary deployment, gradually shifting traffic from the old version to the new version while monitoring metrics

Rolling deployment, updating pods one by one without monitoring

Recreate deployment, stopping the old version and starting the new version

Blue-green deployment, switching all traffic at once

A company is running a stateful microservice on Kubernetes. The service requires sticky sessions so that requests from the same client are routed to the same pod. The team also needs to distribute load across pods. Which Kubernetes feature should they use?

Service with sessionAffinity: ClientIP

A team is deploying a microservice that needs different database credentials in development, staging, and production. They want to avoid storing credentials in the container image and avoid hardcoding them in the application code. Which approach should they use?

Embed the credentials in the image using a multi-stage build

Store the credentials in a ConfigMap and reference them in the deployment manifest

Hardcode the credentials in the application code and use a build-time flag to select the environment

Use a secrets management solution and inject the credentials as environment variables or mounted files at runtime

Which characteristic is a core principle of a microservices architecture?

Services communicate through shared memory and direct function calls.

The entire application is deployed as one monolithic unit.

All services share a single centralized database for consistency.

Each service is independently deployable and scalable.

A software company is containerizing its microservices for deployment to a Kubernetes cluster. The team needs to ensure that container images are built consistently, stored securely, and versioned so that the CI/CD pipeline can deploy a specific version to production. Which combination of practices should the team adopt?

Use a configuration management tool to generate images at runtime

Build images manually on each developer's machine and push to a public registry

Use a private container registry with immutable tags and scan images for vulnerabilities

Store images on a shared network filesystem and use latest tags for simplicity

GIAC Cloud Security Automation

Domain 4Objective 2

Microservices Architecture and Deployment GCSA Practice Questions (Page 5)

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 21–25

21expert · hard
A company is deploying a new version of a user-facing microservice. They want to minimize the risk of a bad release affecting all users, but they also need to be able to compare the performance of the new version against the old version. They have a monitoring system that can track error rates and latency. Which deployment strategy should they use?
Select an answer first
22expert · hard
A company is running a stateful microservice on Kubernetes. The service requires sticky sessions so that requests from the same client are routed to the same pod. The team also needs to distribute load across pods. Which Kubernetes feature should they use?
Select an answer first
23application · medium
A team is deploying a microservice that needs different database credentials in development, staging, and production. They want to avoid storing credentials in the container image and avoid hardcoding them in the application code. Which approach should they use?
Select an answer first
24foundation · easy
Which characteristic is a core principle of a microservices architecture?
Select an answer first
25application · medium
A software company is containerizing its microservices for deployment to a Kubernetes cluster. The team needs to ensure that container images are built consistently, stored securely, and versioned so that the CI/CD pipeline can deploy a specific version to production. Which combination of practices should the team adopt?
Select an answer first

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Microservices Architecture and Deployment GCSA Practice Questions (Page 5)

Questions 21–25

A company is running a stateful microservice on Kubernetes. The service requires sticky sessions so that requests from the same client are routed to the same pod. The team also needs to distribute load across pods. Which Kubernetes feature should they use?

A team is deploying a microservice that needs different database credentials in development, staging, and production. They want to avoid storing credentials in the container image and avoid hardcoding them in the application code. Which approach should they use?

Which characteristic is a core principle of a microservices architecture?

Keep studying — Container and Microservices Lifecycle