Interview question - Have you built any microservice?

[Monica Shiralkar]

I have been asked this interview question multiple times and I find it surprising. Multiple microservices would be created when one is following the Microservice Architecture instead of going for Monolithic architecture. And in Microservice Architecture, there would be multiple microservices and not a single microservice. So "have you built any microservice" sounds bit surprising to me. If one follows this architecture one would possibly implement multiple not "any". A question like "Are you following microservice based architecture ? Can you explain how you followed it and built microservices"? .  When I am asked this question "have you built any microservice", I say yes we follow microservice architecture and then I explain them what it means and tell them the different microservices we have.
Is this question right that "have you built any microservice"?.  
Thanks

[Ron McLeod]

I would understand the question as: Have you built any microservice which was used, or could be used as part of a greater application?

[Monica Shiralkar]

I get the feeling that when they ask "Have you built any microservice", they mean to ask "Have you built any Microservices of RESTful APIs using Spring Boot"?

[Tim Moores]

I'm with Ron. I think you're making too much of the phrasing. I also don't see how the question would imply Spring Boot - using that is an orthogonal decision to the one regarding microservices.

[Monica Shiralkar]

I was asked "What is the project structure in a Microservice?". Microservice can be for UI, for Backend REST APIs, for Data processing etc. So, all applications would have different structure. Not that any microservice will have a particular project structure. That's what I understand.

[Monica Shiralkar]

I was asked a question "When there are multiple microservices communicating with each other, and one of them gives an error then to begin troubleshooting how do you isolate that this error is caused by which microservice". I replied saying that one way is for each application to catch their exception and throw a custom exception that way we can know from the error that it is the custom exception of which microservice. However the interviewer was looking for a different answer.

[Tim Moores]

Look into tracing, e.g. the OpenTracing API that is built into MicroProfile. The Metrics API might also provide useful information.

[Monica Shiralkar]

Does that mean that say we have 4 microservices : one for Notifications, one for UI, one for BackendRESTServices and one for DataProcessing and they communicate with each other then all should be configured on APIs such as OpenTracing API or Metics API?