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KCNA · topic practice

Cloud Native Architecture practice questions

Cloud Native Architecture covers the design principles behind scalable, resilient, loosely coupled systems and the Kubernetes primitives that realize them. Questions test your grasp of microservices, containers, declarative infrastructure, and multi-region high availability, plus which tools provision resources across providers and which Kubernetes resources expose pods as network services.

Courseiva uses original exam-style practice questions designed for learning and revision. The goal is to understand the concepts, recognise exam patterns, and improve through explanations — not memorise copied exam dumps.

Editorial oversight:Johnson Ajibi· MSc IT Security, IEEE Senior Member
20 questionsDomain: Cloud Native Architecture
Practice 10 questionsBrowse domain →

What the exam tests

What to know about Cloud Native Architecture

Be able to name the cloud native principles, pick the right Kubernetes resource to expose pods (Service), and identify infrastructure-as-code tooling that spans providers. For high availability, the key is designing across multiple regions with replication and failover, not relying on one cluster.

Core cloud native principles: microservices, containers, declarative APIs, immutable infrastructure, and loose coupling

Kubernetes Service objects for exposing pods as stable network endpoints, including ClusterIP and LoadBalancer types

Infrastructure as code tooling such as Terraform that provisions resources across multiple cloud providers

High availability patterns: multi-region Kubernetes clusters, replication, failover, and avoiding single points of failure

Why learners struggle

Why Cloud Native Architecture questions are commonly missed

NAT questions are missed when learners confuse the four address types (inside local, inside global, outside local, outside global) or misapply the interface direction. A translation rule can look correct but still fail if the ACL, interface, or direction is wrong.

  • ·Inside local vs inside global — inside local is the private source, inside global is the translated public address
  • ·PAT overloads — many sources share one public IP using unique port numbers
  • ·Interface direction — ip nat inside and ip nat outside must be on the correct interfaces
  • ·Static NAT vs dynamic NAT vs PAT — each serves a different use case
  • ·The NAT ACL identifies traffic to translate, not traffic to permit or deny
  • ·A missing translation can look like a routing problem if the interfaces are misconfigured

Watch out for

Common Cloud Native Architecture exam traps

  • ▸Confusing a Kubernetes Service with a Deployment or Ingress; the Service exposes pods as a network service, not the workload controller itself.
  • ▸Assuming a single cloud provider or region gives high availability; multi-region designs need replication and failover across clusters.
  • ▸Treating infrastructure as code as only configuration management; tools like Terraform provision and manage resources declaratively across providers.

Practice set

Cloud Native Architecture questions

20 questions · select your answer, then reveal the explanation

Question 1mediummultiple choice
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A company wants to migrate its monolithic application to a cloud-native architecture on Kubernetes. The application currently uses a shared database and communicates via internal HTTP calls. Which design pattern should be applied first to increase resilience and enable independent scaling of components?

Question 2hardmultiple choice
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A cloud-native application experiences periodic timeouts when calling a downstream service. The downstream service is running in the same Kubernetes cluster. Which design pattern should be implemented to handle this gracefully?

Question 3hardmultiple choice
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A startup is designing a cloud-native application that processes IoT sensor data. The data arrives in bursts, and processing must be fault-tolerant with exactly-once semantics. The team considers Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, and Amazon SQS. Which choice best meets the requirements of a cloud-native architecture?

Question 4mediummultiple choice
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A team is migrating a legacy application to Kubernetes. The application requires persistent storage and needs to maintain session affinity. Which set of Kubernetes resources should they use?

Question 5hardmultiple choice
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The exhibit shows pod status and logs. The web pod lmn34 has restarted 3 times. What is the root cause of the liveness probe failure?

Exhibit

Refer to the exhibit.
```
$ kubectl get pods -n production
NAME                      READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
api-7d4f8b8c6-abc12       1/1     Running   0          5m
api-7d4f8b8c6-xyz78       1/1     Running   0          5m
web-9f6c8d7e5-lmn34       1/1     Running   3          10m
web-9f6c8d7e5-pqr56       1/1     Running   0          10m
$ kubectl logs web-9f6c8d7e5-lmn34
Error: failed to connect to database at 10.0.0.1:3306
$ kubectl describe pod web-9f6c8d7e5-lmn34 | grep -A5 Events
Events:
  Type     Reason     Age   From               Message
  ----     ------     ----  ----               -------
  Warning  Unhealthy  2m    kubelet            Liveness probe failed: HTTP probe failed with statuscode: 503
  Normal   Killing    2m    kubelet            Container failed liveness probe, will be restarted
  Normal   Pulling    2m    kubelet            Pulling image "webapp:2.0"
```
Question 6easymulti select
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Which TWO of the following are key principles of cloud native architecture?

Question 7hardmultiple choice
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A developer creates the Pod manifest shown. When the Pod runs, the liveness probe fails and the container is restarted repeatedly. What is the most likely cause?

Exhibit

Refer to the exhibit.
```
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: web-app
spec:
  containers:
  - name: app
    image: nginx:latest
    ports:
    - containerPort: 80
    livenessProbe:
      httpGet:
        path: /healthz
        port: 8080
      initialDelaySeconds: 3
      periodSeconds: 5
```
Question 8mediummultiple choice
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Your organization runs a multi-service application on a Kubernetes cluster. Each service is deployed as a set of Pods managed by a Deployment. The application experiences intermittent slowdowns during peak traffic. Monitoring shows that the database service Pods have high CPU usage, but the HorizontalPodAutoscaler (HPA) configured for the database Deployment does not scale. The HPA is based on average CPU utilization across Pods, with target 70%. The database Deployment has resource requests and limits set: requests.cpu: 500m, limits.cpu: 1000m. During peak, CPU usage reaches 800m per Pod. The HPA has a cooldown period of 3 minutes. The cluster has ample capacity. What is the most likely reason the HPA is not scaling?

Question 9hardmultiple choice
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An application experiences intermittent failures when calling an external API. Which resilience pattern should be implemented to handle transient faults?

Question 10easymultiple choice
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Which CNCF project is commonly used for Infrastructure as Code to provision cloud resources?

Question 11hardmultiple choice
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Which GitOps tool is a CNCF graduated project that synchronizes Kubernetes clusters with a Git repository?

Question 12mediummulti select
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Which TWO of the following are CNCF graduated projects? (Choose two.)

Question 13easymultiple choice
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What is the primary purpose of the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation)?

Question 14easymultiple choice
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Which of the following is a core principle of cloud native architecture as defined by the CNCF?

Question 15easymultiple choice
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Which of the following is a graduated CNCF project?

Question 17easymultiple choice
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Which CNCF project is primarily focused on providing a unified way to define and manage cloud-native applications using declarative configuration stored in Git?

Question 18mediummultiple choice
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A development team wants to deploy a serverless function that scales to zero when not in use. Which CNCF project or platform is BEST suited for this requirement?

Question 19hardmultiple choice
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Which of the following is a resiliency pattern that limits the number of concurrent requests to a service to prevent overload?

Question 20mediummultiple choice
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A team wants to implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for managing Kubernetes resources. Which tool is BEST suited for this purpose?

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Focused Cloud Native Architecture sessions

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Frequently asked questions

What does the KCNA exam test about Cloud Native Architecture?
Be able to name the cloud native principles, pick the right Kubernetes resource to expose pods (Service), and identify infrastructure-as-code tooling that spans providers. For high availability, the key is designing across multiple regions with replication and failover, not relying on one cluster.
How should I use these practice questions?
Select your answer before revealing the explanation. Then read why each option is right or wrong — this active recall approach builds retention far faster than re-reading notes.
Can I practise just Cloud Native Architecture questions in a focused session?
Yes — the session launcher on this page draws every question from the Cloud Native Architecture domain. Use a 10-question session first to gauge your baseline, then move to 20 or 30 once the weak spots are clear.
Where can I practise other KCNA topics?
Use the topic links above to move to related areas, or go back to the KCNA question bank to see all topics.
Are these real exam questions or dumps?
These are original practice questions written to test the same concepts the KCNA exam covers. They are not copied from any real exam or dump site.