7.9.2: Critical Thinking Questions

Critical Thinking Questions

1. API Design Philosophy: REST has become the dominant API style for cloud services, but gRPC is gaining adoption for service-to-service communication within microservices. Compare the two approaches. In what scenarios would gRPC be preferable to REST, and vice versa? Consider factors like performance, developer experience, browser compatibility, and tooling.

2. Distributed Transactions: An e-commerce platform processes orders across three microservices: Inventory (reserves stock), Payment (charges credit card), and Shipping (schedules delivery). If the payment fails after inventory is reserved, how should the system handle this? Compare the traditional ACID approach with the Saga pattern used in modern distributed systems.

3. Legacy Integration: A large insurance company has critical business logic embedded in CORBA-based systems built in the 1990s. They want to modernize and expose these capabilities via cloud APIs. What migration strategies would you recommend? Should they rewrite, wrap, or gradually replace the CORBA services?

4. API Versioning: A cloud service provider needs to update their REST API in a way that changes the response format, which could break existing client applications. Discuss strategies for API versioning (URL path versioning, header versioning, query parameter versioning). What are the trade-offs, and which approach would you recommend?