8.11.2: Critical Thinking Questions — Read

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Microservices Complexity: "You shouldn't start with microservices" is advice commonly given to startups. Argue for and against this position. At what point does the complexity of microservices become justified? What signals indicate an organization should migrate from a monolith to microservices?
Kubernetes vs. Serverless: Compare deploying a microservices application on Kubernetes (EKS/GKE) versus as serverless functions (Lambda/Cloud Functions). Under what workload characteristics does each approach excel? Consider cost, operational overhead, cold start latency, and team expertise.
Chaos Engineering Ethics: Netflix's Chaos Monkey randomly terminates production instances to test resilience. Some argue this is irresponsible because it could affect real users. Others argue it's essential for building truly resilient systems. Evaluate both perspectives. How should chaos engineering be implemented responsibly? What safeguards should be in place?
Security in Depth: A cloud-native application using microservices has many more network communication paths than a monolith. How does this expand the attack surface? Design a defense-in-depth security strategy for a microservices application covering: API authentication, network segmentation, secrets management, container image security, and runtime monitoring.

This page titled 8.11.2: Critical Thinking Questions was last modified on Tue, 22 Sep 2026 21:36:40 GMT and is shared under a CC BY 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Felix Amoruwa.

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