KCNA Cloud Native Architecture Practice Question
A startup is building a cloud-native application and wants to ensure that its services can be discovered and communicated with dynamically as they scale up and down. Which CNCF project provides a distributed key-value store that is commonly used for service discovery and configuration management in Kubernetes?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse monitoring or logging tools with a key-value store for service discovery.
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
✓
etcd
etcd is the correct choice because it is a distributed key-value store designed for reliable data storage, often used for service discovery and configuration management. In Kubernetes, etcd stores the entire cluster state, and many cloud-native applications use it directly for dynamic configuration and service registration. Its strong consistency and watch capabilities make it ideal for these tasks.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Prometheus
Why it's wrong here
Prometheus is a monitoring and alerting toolkit, not a key-value store for service discovery. While it can discover services via Kubernetes API, it does not provide a distributed key-value store for configuration management. Its primary purpose is metrics collection and alerting, so it does not meet the requirement for service discovery and configuration storage.
- ✗
Jaeger
Why it's wrong here
Jaeger is a distributed tracing system, used for monitoring and troubleshooting microservices-based distributed systems. It does not offer a key-value store for service discovery or configuration management. Its focus is on tracing requests across services, not on storing configuration or enabling service discovery.
- ✗
Fluentd
Why it's wrong here
Fluentd is a log collector and processor, used for unified logging layers. It does not provide a distributed key-value store for service discovery or configuration management. Its role is to collect, transform, and forward logs, so it is not suitable for the described use case.
- ✓
etcd
Why this is correct
etcd is a distributed key-value store that provides reliable data storage for service discovery and configuration management. In Kubernetes, etcd is used as the backing store for all cluster data, and it is also used by many cloud-native applications for service discovery and dynamic configuration. Its watch feature allows clients to be notified of changes, enabling dynamic reconfiguration.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official CNCF exam blueprint
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.