KCNA Cloud Native Architecture Practice Question
A cloud-native application uses a service mesh (Istio) for traffic management. The team notices increased latency in inter-service communication. Which likely cause should be investigated first?
⚠ Common exam trap
CNCF often tests the misconception that mTLS encryption is a major source of latency, but in practice its overhead is negligible compared to misconfigured proxy settings that directly impact request handling.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Misconfigured sidecar proxy settings
In Istio, the sidecar proxy (Envoy) intercepts all inbound and outbound traffic for the application container. Misconfigured proxy settings—such as incorrect timeouts, retry policies, or circuit breaker thresholds—can introduce significant latency by causing unnecessary retries, connection delays, or queueing. This is the most common and immediate cause of increased latency in a service mesh, as the data plane is directly in the request path.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Kubernetes Network Policies blocking traffic
Why it's wrong here
Would cause errors, not just latency.
- ✓
Misconfigured sidecar proxy settings
Why this is correct
Can cause significant latency.
- ✗
Application code is not optimized for the mesh
Why it's wrong here
Code doesn't change.
- ✗
mTLS encryption overhead
Why it's wrong here
Overhead is minimal.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Cloud Native Architecture and Concepts
Key term
Service Mesh
A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer that manages communication between microservices, handling tasks like service discovery, load balancing, encryption, and observability without requiring changes to application code.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This KCNA practice question is part of Courseiva's free CNCF certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the KCNA exam.