Tech concepts,
compared.
The pairs of concepts interviewers ask about most, TCP vs UDP, monolith vs microservices, and more, broken down side by side so the difference actually sticks.
TCP vs UDP
Reliable, ordered delivery versus low-latency, best-effort delivery.
See the breakdownDocker vs Kubernetes
Packaging and running one container versus orchestrating a fleet of them.
See the breakdownMonolith vs Microservices
One deployable codebase versus many independently deployable services.
See the breakdowngit merge vs git rebase
Preserving history with a merge commit versus rewriting history onto a new base.
See the breakdownAuthentication vs Authorization
Proving who you are versus deciding what you are allowed to do.
See the breakdownTerraform vs Ansible
Declaring and provisioning infrastructure versus configuring machines after they exist.
See the breakdownCI vs CD
Automatically testing every change versus automatically shipping it.
See the breakdownBlue-Green vs Canary Deployment
Switching all traffic at once versus shifting a small slice first.
See the breakdownHorizontal vs Vertical Scaling
Adding more machines versus adding more power to one machine.
See the breakdownLoad Balancer vs Reverse Proxy
Distributing traffic across many backends versus fronting one or more backends for other reasons.
See the breakdownMetrics vs Logs
Aggregated numeric signals over time versus discrete, detailed event records.
See the breakdownSymmetric vs Asymmetric Encryption
One shared secret key versus a public/private key pair.
See the breakdown