CMA Technology and Platform Analysis 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A master architect is designing a system that must detect and respond to fraud in under 100 milliseconds. Which processing architecture best fits this requirement?
- Batch processing
- Stream processing (Correct answer)
- Lambda architecture's batch layer only
- Scheduled ETL jobs
Correct answer: Stream processing
Stream processing enables continuous, real-time analysis of data as it arrives, making sub-100ms fraud detection feasible.
Question 2: Which of the following best describes the concept of 'platform lock-in' risk in cloud technology selection?
- The risk that a cloud vendor will raise prices
- The risk that proprietary services make migration to another vendor costly or difficult (Correct answer)
- The risk that the platform will be hacked
- The risk of exceeding budget due to over-provisioning
Correct answer: The risk that proprietary services make migration to another vendor costly or difficult
Platform lock-in occurs when proprietary cloud services, APIs, or data formats make it technically or financially difficult to switch vendors.
Question 3: In a microservices platform, which pattern allows a service to maintain its own data store and prevents direct database sharing between services?
- Shared database pattern
- Database-per-service pattern (Correct answer)
- CQRS without event sourcing
- Two-phase commit
Correct answer: Database-per-service pattern
The database-per-service pattern ensures each microservice owns its data store, enabling independent deployment and technology choice.
Question 4: Which metric best measures the proportion of time a system is actually operational and available to users?
- Mean Time to Repair (MTTR)
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
- Availability percentage (uptime %) (Correct answer)
- Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)
Correct answer: Availability percentage (uptime %)
Availability percentage (uptime %) directly measures the proportion of time a system is operational, expressed as a percentage of total time.
Question 5: A CMA is evaluating a containerization strategy. Which statement best describes the advantage of containers over traditional virtual machines?
- Containers provide stronger hardware-level isolation than VMs
- Containers share the host OS kernel, making them lighter and faster to start (Correct answer)
- Containers eliminate the need for any operating system
- Containers can only run on Linux hosts
Correct answer: Containers share the host OS kernel, making them lighter and faster to start
Containers share the host OS kernel rather than emulating full hardware, making them much lighter in resource usage and faster to start than VMs.
Question 6: When a master architect recommends a strangler fig pattern for a legacy system modernization, what is the primary goal?
- Rewriting the entire legacy system at once in a big-bang migration
- Incrementally replacing legacy functionality with new services while keeping the old system running (Correct answer)
- Strangling the budget of the legacy system to force replacement
- Migrating data to a new database before replacing application code
Correct answer: Incrementally replacing legacy functionality with new services while keeping the old system running
The strangler fig pattern incrementally replaces legacy system functionality with new implementations, allowing the old and new systems to coexist during transition.
Question 7: In technology platform analysis, what does the term 'technology debt' (tech debt) primarily refer to?
- Financial loans taken to purchase technology infrastructure
- The accumulated cost of expedient but suboptimal technical decisions that must eventually be addressed (Correct answer)
- Licensing fees owed to software vendors
- The gap between current and desired technology maturity levels
Correct answer: The accumulated cost of expedient but suboptimal technical decisions that must eventually be addressed
Technical debt refers to the implied cost of future rework caused by choosing quick or suboptimal solutions instead of better approaches.
CMA Technology and Platform Analysis 3
A master architect is designing a system that must detect and respond to fraud in under 100 milliseconds.
Which processing architecture best fits this requirement?