Architectural Patterns and Styles Flashcards

Which architectural quality attribute does the Bulkhead pattern primarily protect?

Answer: Availability and fault isolation

The Bulkhead pattern isolates components into pools so that a failure or resource exhaustion in one pool does not cascade to others, preserving overall system availability.

In a layered (n-tier) architecture, what rule governs the direction of dependencies between layers?

Answer: Higher layers may only depend on lower layers, never the reverse

The strict layering rule dictates that each layer only depends on the layer directly below it, preventing upward dependencies and promoting loose coupling.

Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) most directly improves which architectural quality?

Answer: Temporal decoupling between producers and consumers

EDA allows producers to emit events without waiting for consumers to process them, enabling components to operate and scale independently at different speeds.

Which statement correctly distinguishes Orchestration from Choreography in distributed workflow coordination?

Answer: Orchestration uses a central controller that tells services what to do; choreography relies on services reacting to events

In orchestration, a central workflow engine explicitly directs service execution order, while choreography has services react autonomously to domain events without central coordination.

The Space-Based Architecture (SBA) pattern addresses scalability by eliminating which common bottleneck?

Answer: The central database as a synchronization point by distributing both data and processing

SBA distributes processing units with their own in-memory data grid, removing the central database bottleneck and enabling near-linear horizontal scaling.

In Domain-Driven Design, a Bounded Context directly influences architecture by defining what?

Answer: Clear linguistic and functional boundaries within which a particular domain model applies

A Bounded Context establishes the scope where a specific ubiquitous language and domain model are valid, typically mapping to a service or subsystem boundary.

Which trade-off is a direct consequence of applying the microservices architectural style compared to a monolith?

Answer: Increased operational complexity in exchange for independent deployability and scalability

Microservices improve independent scalability and deployment but introduce distributed systems challenges such as network latency, eventual consistency, and complex operations.