In this post, we will learn about Spring cloud interview questions and answers for beginners as well as experienced professionals. Please bookmark this post, we will keep adding more questions and answers.

Read Also: Top 40 Most Frequently Asked Spring Boot Interview Questions and Answers

Top 16 Spring Cloud Interview Questions and Answers

Q1. What do you understand with the term Spring Cloud? In other words, what is Spring Cloud?

According to Spring docs, Spring Cloud provides tools for programmers/developers to quickly build some common patterns in distributed systems. For example, circuit breakers, service discovery, configuration management, one-time tokens, cluster state, etc.

Q2. Explain the features of the Spring Cloud?

Below are some of the features that Spring Cloud provides:
1. Service registration and discovery
2. Load balancing
3. Service to service calls
4. Routing
5. Distributed/versioned configuration

Q3 What do you understand by the term Service registration and discovery?

This is one of the most important questions on Spring Cloud. Please go through it once before appearing for the interview.

When we start any spring project, we usually have the entire configurations in the properties file.

With time, more and more services are developed and deployed. Adding and modifying these properties become more complex.

Some service locations might change while some might go down. Changing the properties manually may create issues.

Eureka service discovery and registration is useful in such scenarios.

All services are registered to the Eureka server and lookup is done by calling the Eureka server, it does not need to handle any change in service locations and is taken care of Microservice Registration and Discovery with Spring cloud using Netflix Eureka.

Q4. What design patterns are commonly used in Microservices?

1. Proxy microservice design pattern
2. Aggregator microservice design pattern
3. Branch microservice design pattern
4. Chained microservice design pattern
5. Asynchronous messaging microservice design pattern
6. Shared data microservice design pattern

Q5 Explain Spring Cloud Consul or What is Spring Cloud Consul?

Spring Cloud Consul provides simple annotations through which you can quickly enable and configure the common patterns like Service Discovery, Distributed configuration, and Control Bus inside your application and build large distributed systems.

Spring Cloud Consul provides the following features:

a. Service Discovery
b. Supports client-side load-balancer i.e. Ribbon via Spring Cloud Netflix.
c. Supports distributed configuration: using the consul key/value store.
d. Supports a dynamic router and filter i.e. Zuul via Spring Cloud Netflix.

From above, we can conclude that with the help of the consul, a centralized configuration can be done. Consul also provides the multiple environment support.

Q6 Explain load balancing, in other words, what is load balancing?

In simple words, Load Balancing is used to improve the distribution of workloads across several computing resources such as network lines, disk drives, computer cluster CPUs.

Types of Load Balancers:

types of load balancers

You can implement the load balancing in the Spring Cloud using the Netflix ribbon.

Q7 Explain Spring Cloud Ribbon or what is Spring Cloud Ribbon?

One can scale microservice architecture application in both horizontal i.e. by providing more than one instances available of the same service as well as vertical i.e. by increasing the allocation of heap memory.
Horizontal scaling is done by using the Load balancers.
Netflix Ribbon can be used to provide client-side load balancing. It chooses which server to send the request to using some criteria. Round Robin is the algorithm used by Netflix Ribbon for load balancing.
Netflix ribbon load balancing

Q8 Explain Netflix Feign or What is Netflix Feign?

Netflix Feign is simply a Java to HTTP client binder. It is inspired by WebSocket, JAXRS-2.0, and Retrofit.
The main goal of Netflix Feign is to reduce the complexity of binding denominators uniformly to HTTP APIs regardless of RESTfulness.

Q9 What is Hystrix?

The main goal of the Hystrix is to provide a fault-tolerance and latency library. It is designed for isolating points of access to remote systems, stopping cascading failures, third-party libraries, and enabling resilience in complex distributed systems where failure is common and cannot be avoided.

Q10 What is the purpose of the Hystrix circuit breaker?

Circuit breaker pattern implementation is provided by Netflix's Hystrix library. If a method uses the circuit-breaker, Hystrix looks up for failing calls to that method. Hystrix opens the circuit if failures build-up to the threshold. As a result, the subsequent calls automatically fail.

Q11 What is the use of the Spring cloud bus?

The feature to refresh configurations across several multiple instances is provided by the Spring Cloud Bus.

Q12 List some of the commonly used Spring Cloud annotations?

Given below are the most commonly used Spring Cloud annotations for Java developers:
1. @EnableCircuitBreaker
2. @EnableConfigServer
3. @EnableEurekaServer
4. @HystrixCommand
5. @EnableDiscoveryClient

Q13 What is the major difference between Spring-Boot and Spring Cloud?

In simple words, Spring Cloud is a microservice management coordination framework. It is used to integrate and manage individual microservices. On the other hand, Spring boot is used to develop these microservices.

Q14 Name a few services that provide service registration and discovery?

Eureka and zookeeper

Q15 What is PCF?

The full form of PCF is Pivotal Cloud foundry. PCF is an open-source and multi-platform foundry.

Q16 Mention the benefits of Zookeeper and Eureka in Spring Cloud?

Zookeeper guarantees partition fault-tolerance and consistency whereas Eureka guarantees high usability and availability.

That's all for today, please mention in the comments in case you have any questions related to Spring Cloud Interview Questions and Answers.