Advanced Software and Cloud Technology

1. What is "multi-tenancy" in cloud computing?

• A. Each customer has dedicated hardware
• B. Multiple customers sharing the same computing infrastructure with logical isolation ✓
• C. A type of hybrid cloud
• D. Dedicated cloud for enterprises

💡 Multi-tenancy serves multiple customers from shared infrastructure with logical isolation between tenants, reducing costs for providers.

2. What is "API rate limiting"?

• A. Speeding up API responses
• B. Controlling how many API requests a client can make in a given time window ✓
• C. Caching API responses
• D. Encrypting API traffic

💡 API rate limiting prevents abuse by restricting the number of requests from a client within a time window, protecting server resources.

3. What is "SRE" (Site Reliability Engineering)?

• A. A software testing methodology
• B. A software development approach
• C. An engineering discipline applying software engineering practices to operations and reliability ✓
• D. A type of DevOps tool

💡 SRE (pioneered by Google) applies software engineering principles to operations, balancing reliability with feature development velocity.

4. What is "polyglot persistence"?

• A. Using one database for everything
• B. Using different data storage technologies for different parts of an application based on their needs ✓
• C. A type of NoSQL database
• D. A multi-language programming approach

💡 Polyglot persistence uses multiple database types (SQL, document, graph, cache) within one application, choosing the best fit for each use case.

5. What is "observability" in distributed systems?

• A. A monitoring dashboard
• B. The ability to understand a system's internal state from its external outputs (logs, metrics, traces) ✓
• C. A type of logging only
• D. A network monitoring tool

💡 Observability combines logs, metrics, and distributed traces to provide complete insight into system behavior and diagnose issues in complex systems.

6. What is "distributed tracing"?

• A. Logging errors in one service
• B. Tracking a request as it flows through multiple services in a distributed system to identify bottlenecks ✓
• C. A type of load balancing
• D. A database query optimization

💡 Distributed tracing follows a request through multiple microservices, recording timing and metadata to identify performance issues across the system.

7. What is "GitOps"?

• A. Using Git for version control only
• B. Using Git as the single source of truth for declarative infrastructure and application deployment ✓
• C. A type of CI/CD pipeline
• D. A cloud storage strategy

💡 GitOps uses Git repositories as the source of truth for infrastructure and application config, with automated deployment syncing from Git to production.

8. What is "Infrastructure as Code" (IaC)?

• A. Writing infrastructure documentation
• B. Managing and provisioning infrastructure through machine-readable configuration files ✓
• C. A type of cloud service
• D. A hardware management system

💡 IaC manages infrastructure (servers, networks, databases) through code (Terraform, CloudFormation) enabling version control and automation.

9. What is "canary deployment"?

• A. Deploying to all users at once
• B. Releasing a new version to a small subset of users first to validate before full rollout ✓
• C. A type of blue-green deployment
• D. A rollback strategy

💡 Canary deployments release updates to a small percentage of users first, monitoring for issues before gradually expanding to all users.

10. What is "zero trust security"?

• A. Trusting all internal network traffic
• B. A security model assuming no user or device is trusted by default, requiring verification for every access request ✓
• C. A type of firewall
• D. Trusting verified users permanently

💡 Zero trust assumes breach and verifies every access request regardless of network location — "never trust, always verify."

11. What is "WASM" (WebAssembly)?

• A. A JavaScript framework
• B. A binary instruction format for a stack-based VM enabling high-performance code in browsers ✓
• C. A type of CSS
• D. A web server protocol

💡 WebAssembly is a low-level binary format running in browsers at near-native speed, enabling C/C++/Rust code to run on the web.

12. What is "eventual consistency" in cloud systems?

• A. Data is always instantly consistent
• B. All nodes will eventually have the same data given no new updates, accepting temporary inconsistency ✓
• C. Data is never consistent
• D. Consistency enforced by transactions

💡 Eventual consistency is a model where updates propagate through distributed systems over time, temporarily allowing inconsistent reads.

13. What is "service mesh" in microservices?

• A. A type of load balancer
• B. A dedicated infrastructure layer handling service-to-service communication, security, and observability ✓
• C. A type of API gateway
• D. A container runtime

💡 A service mesh (like Istio) handles inter-service communication, providing traffic management, mTLS security, and observability automatically.

14. What is "immutable infrastructure"?

• A. Infrastructure that cannot be deleted
• B. Infrastructure that is never modified after deployment — instead replaced entirely with new versions ✓
• C. A type of IaC
• D. Read-only database storage

💡 Immutable infrastructure replaces servers rather than updating them, ensuring consistency and eliminating configuration drift.

15. What is "Kubernetes" used for?

• A. A programming language
• B. A type of database
• C. Automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications ✓
• D. A cloud storage service

💡 Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized workloads.

16. What is "SLO" in site reliability engineering?

• A. Server Load Optimization
• B. Service Level Objective — a target value for a service reliability metric ✓
• C. Software License Object
• D. System Log Output

💡 An SLO is a measurable reliability target (e.g., 99.9% uptime) that a service aims to meet within a defined period.

17. What is "blue-green deployment"?

• A. A color-coded version control
• B. Running two identical production environments, routing traffic from old (blue) to new (green) with instant rollback capability ✓
• C. A type of A/B testing
• D. A container strategy

💡 Blue-green deployment maintains two identical environments — traffic switches from blue (current) to green (new) instantly, enabling zero-downtime deploys.

18. What is "feature flag" in software deployment?

• A. A type of bug
• B. A technique allowing features to be enabled or disabled at runtime without redeploying code ✓
• C. A deployment pipeline
• D. A type of A/B test only

💡 Feature flags let teams toggle features on/off in production without code deployments, enabling controlled rollouts and instant rollbacks.

19. What is "chaos engineering"?

• A. Randomly deleting code
• B. Intentionally introducing failures into a system to test its resilience and identify weaknesses ✓
• C. A type of security testing
• D. A random deployment strategy

💡 Chaos engineering deliberately injects failures (Netflix's Chaos Monkey) to verify that systems can withstand unexpected disruptions.

20. What is "eBPF" in Linux technology?

• A. Extended Berkeley Packet Filter — allows running sandboxed programs in the OS kernel for networking, security, and observability ✓
• B. A type of firewall
• C. A container runtime
• D. A type of VPN

💡 eBPF lets developers run sandboxed programs in the Linux kernel without modifying kernel source code, enabling powerful networking and observability tools.