Service Communication and API Design Questions
Design and specify APIs and interservice communication patterns for systems that must scale. Topics include REST design and best practices, API versioning and deprecation strategies, backward compatibility and API evolution, contract design between services, choosing protocols such as gRPC versus HTTP for internal or external communication, security and authentication patterns at the API level, performance and scalability considerations, observability and monitoring of service interactions, and strategies for evolving interfaces without breaking consumers.
HardTechnical
39 practiced
Explain strategies for safe API schema branching and merging in a large organization where multiple teams propose incompatible changes simultaneously. As a Solutions Architect, describe policy-driven approvals, feature-flagged deployments, and how to use an API registry to manage branches and avoid merge conflicts at the contract level.
MediumTechnical
82 practiced
A customer is evaluating gRPC (HTTP/2 + Protobuf) versus JSON over HTTP for internal microservice communication and external partner APIs. As a Solutions Architect, list the criteria you would use (performance, streaming, language support, client compatibility, observability, firewall traversal) and recommend which to use for: a) internal high-throughput services b) public partner APIs.
MediumTechnical
51 practiced
Design a secure token lifecycle for APIs: include token issuance, refresh, revocation, and short-lived tokens vs long-lived API keys. As a Solutions Architect, explain the client UX trade-offs and how to implement revocation that works across distributed services and caches.
HardTechnical
39 practiced
Describe runtime techniques to evolve APIs without breaking consumers: side-by-side adapters, facade/proxy translation layers, and compatibility shim services. As a Solutions Architect, propose when to use each technique and how to route traffic (e.g., header-based routing, canary) to test translations while minimizing consumer impact.
MediumTechnical
50 practiced
Describe how you would implement consumer-driven contract testing (for example, with Pact) across service boundaries in CI/CD. As a Solutions Architect, include how to publish provider verification results, manage shared test environments, and enforce contracts prior to deployment to production.
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