Spring Cloud Interview Questions

The document provides an overview of Spring Cloud, including its components like Spring Cloud Stream, Eureka for service registration and discovery, and Hystrix for fault tolerance. It discusses the advantages of using Spring Cloud in distributed microservices, addressing complexities such as service discovery, load balancing, and performance issues. Additionally, it introduces Netflix Feign as a simplified HTTP client for consuming REST services, enhancing code efficiency and reducing complexity.

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Spring Cloud Interview Questions

Uploaded by

Suresh

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Spring Cloud Interview Questions

In this post we will look at Spring Cloud questions. Examples are

provided with explanation.

Q: What is Spring Cloud?

A: Spring Cloud Stream App Starters are Spring Boot based Spring
Integration applications that provide integration with external
systems. Spring Cloud Task. A short-lived microservices framework to
quickly build applications that perform finite amounts of data
processing.
Spring Cloud

Q: What are the advantages of using Spring Cloud?

A: When developing distributed microservices with Spring Boot we
face the following issues-
 Complexity associated with distributed systems-
This overhead includes network issues, Latency overhead,
Bandwidth issues, security issues.
 Service Discovery-
Service discovery tools manage how processes and services in a
cluster can find and talk to one another. It involves a directory of
services, registering services in that directory, and then being
able to lookup and connect to services in that directory.
 Redundancy-
Redundancy issues in distributed systems.
 Loadbalancing-
Load balancing improves the distribution of workloads across
multiple computing resources, such as computers, a computer
cluster, network links, central processing units, or disk drives.
 Performance issues-
Performance issues due to various operational overheads.
 Deployment complexities-
Requirement of Devops skills.

Q: What does one mean by Service Registration and Discovery?

How is it implemented in Spring Cloud?
A: When we start a project, we usally have all the configurations in
the properties file. As more and more services are developed and
deployed, adding and modifying these properties become more
complex. Some services might go down, while some the location might
change. This manual changing of properties may create issues.
Eureka Service Registration and Discovery helps in such scenarios. As
all services are registered to the Eureka server and lookup done by
calling the Eureka Server, any change in service locations need not be
handled and is taken care of
Microservice Registration and Discovery with Spring cloud using
Netflix Eureka.

Q: What does one mean by Load Balancing ? How is it

implemented in Spring Cloud?
A: In computing, load balancing improves the distribution of
workloads across multiple computing resources, such as computers, a
computer cluster, network links, central processing units, or disk
drives. Load balancing aims to optimize resource use, maximize
throughput, minimize response time, and avoid overload of any single
resource. Using multiple components with load balancing instead of a
single component may increase reliability and availability through
redundancy. Load balancing usually involves dedicated software or
hardware, such as a multilayer switch or a Domain Name System
server process.
In SpringCloud this can be implemented using Netflix Ribbon.
Spring Cloud- Netflix Eureka + Ribbon Simple Example
Q: What is Hystrix? How does it implement Fault Tolerance?
A: In computing, load balancing improves the distribution of
workloads across multiple computing resources, such as computers, a
computer cluster, network links, central processing units, or disk
drives. Load balancing aims to optimize resource use, maximize
throughput, minimize response time, and avoid overload of any single
resource. Using multiple components with load balancing instead of a
single component may increase reliability and availability through
redundancy. Load balancing usually involves dedicated software or
hardware, such as a multilayer switch or a Domain Name System
server process.
In SpringCloud this can be implemented using Netflix Ribbon.
Spring Cloud- Netflix Eureka + Ribbon Simple Example

Q: What is Hystrix? How does it implement Fault Tolerance?

A: Hystrix is a latency and fault tolerance library designed to
isolate points of access to remote systems, services and 3rd
party libraries, stop cascading failure and enable resilience in
complex distributed systems where failure is inevitable.
Usually for systems developed using Microservices architecture, there
are many microservices involved. These microservices collaborate
with each other.
Consider the following microservices-
Suppose if the microservice 9 in the above diagram failed, then using
the traditional approach we will propagate an exception. But this will
still cause the whole system to crash anyways.
This problem gets more complex as the number of microservices
increase. The number of microservices can be as high as 1000. This is
where hystrix comes into picture
We will be the Fallback method feature of Hystrix for this scenario.
We have two services employee-consumer consuming the service
exposed by the employee-producer.
The simplified diagram is as below-

Now suppose due to some reason the employee-producer exposed

service throws an exception. In this case using Hystrix we define a
fallback method. This fallback method should have the same return
type as the exposed service. In case of exception in the exposed
service the fallback method will return some value. Spring Cloud-
Netflix Hystrix Fallback method Simple Example
Q: What is Hystrix Circuit Breaker? Need for it?
A: Due to some reason the employee-producer exposed service throws
an exception. In this case using Hystrix we defined a fallback method.
In case of exception in the exposed service the fallback method
returned some default value.
If the exceptions keep on occuring in the firstPage method() then the
Hystrix circuit will break and the employee consumer will skip the
firtsPage method all together and directly call the fallback method.
The purpose of circuit breaker is to give time to the first page method
or other methods that the firstpage method might be calling and is
causing the exception to recover. It might happen that on less load
the issue causing the exceptions have better chance of recovering
Spring Cloud- Circuit Breaker using Netflix Hystrix Simple Example

Q: What is Netflix Feign? What are its advantages?

A: Feign is a java to http client binder inspired by Retrofit, JAXRS-2.0,
and WebSocket. Feign's first goal was reducing the complexity of
binding Denominator uniformly to http apis regardless of restfulness.
Previous examples in the employee-consumer we consumed the REST
services exposed by the employee-producer using REST Template
But we had to write a lot of code to perform following-
 For Load balancing using Ribbon.
 Getting the Service instance and then the Base URL.

 Make use of the REST Template for consuming service.

The previous code was as below

@Controller
public class ConsumerControllerClient {

@Autowired
private LoadBalancerClient loadBalancer;

public void getEmployee() throws RestClientException, IOException {

ServiceInstance serviceInstance=loadBalancer.choose("employee-
producer");

System.out.println(serviceInstance.getUri());

String baseUrl=serviceInstance.getUri().toString();

baseUrl=baseUrl+"/employee";

RestTemplate restTemplate = new RestTemplate();

ResponseEntity<String> response=null;
try{
response=restTemplate.exchange(baseUrl,
HttpMethod.GET, getHeaders(),String.class);
}catch (Exception ex)
{
System.out.println(ex);
}
System.out.println(response.getBody());
}

The previous code, there are chances of exceptions like NullPointer

and is not optimal. We will see how the call is made much easier and
cleaner using Netflix Feign. If the Netflix Ribbon dependency is also
in the classpath, then Feign also takes care of load balancing by
default.