CMA - Certified Master Architect Architectural Design and Patterns Questions and Answers

Question 1

A rapidly growing e-commerce platform is transitioning from a monolithic architecture to microservices.
They need to ensure data consistency for transactions that span multiple services, such as processing an order which involves updating inventory, charging the customer, and arranging for shipping.
If any of these steps fail, the entire transaction must be rolled back.
Which architectural pattern is most suitable for managing this multi-service transaction?

Accepted Answer

Saga Pattern

Answer

Circuit Breaker

Answer

API Gateway

Answer

Strangler Fig Pattern

Question 2

An enterprise is planning to modernize a large, business-critical legacy monolithic application. A 'big bang' rewrite is considered too risky due to the potential for service disruption. The goal is to incrementally replace parts of the legacy system with new microservices over time, while the entire application remains operational for users. Which design pattern provides a structured approach for this gradual migration?

Accepted Answer

Strangler Fig Pattern

Answer

Bulkhead Pattern

Answer

Event Sourcing

Answer

Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS)

Question 3

A financial services application requires a complete and immutable audit trail of all transactions. For compliance and analytical purposes, the business needs the ability to reconstruct the state of any account at any point in history. Simply storing the current state of the data is insufficient. Which pattern best addresses this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Event Sourcing

Answer

Stateful Service

Answer

Snapshotting

Answer

Transactional Outbox

Question 4

A complex system has significantly different requirements for reading and writing data. The read operations are frequent, high-volume, and need to be highly optimized for performance using denormalized data structures. The write operations are less frequent but involve complex business logic and validation on a normalized model. Which pattern would be most effective for architecting this system?

Accepted Answer

Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS)

Answer

Microservices Architecture

Answer

Layered Architecture

Answer

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

Question 5

Which of the following is a significant drawback when choosing a microservices architecture over a monolithic architecture for a small, startup team with a tight deadline for their initial product launch?

Accepted Answer

Higher initial operational complexity and overhead.

Answer

Reduced scalability for individual components.

Answer

Increased development velocity for a small team.

Answer

Tighter coupling between application components.

Question 6

In a distributed system implementing the Saga pattern for a long-running transaction, one of the local transactions fails. What is the primary mechanism used by the Saga pattern to ensure data consistency across the services?

Accepted Answer

A series of compensating transactions are executed to undo the changes made by preceding successful transactions.

Answer

The system automatically retries the failed transaction indefinitely.

Answer

A two-phase commit (2PC) protocol is initiated to roll back all transactions.

Answer

The entire transaction is aborted, and all participating services are restored from a previous snapshot.