CPSA Cross-cutting Concepts 5

Question 1

Which cross-cutting concern category includes audit logging, performance metrics collection, and health check endpoints?

Accepted Answer

Observability

Answer

Audit logs, metrics, and health checks all belong to observability — the cross-cutting concern of making a system's internal state and history visible to operators.

Question 2

A software architect proposes using a shared exception hierarchy and a common error-handling framework. This addresses which architectural quality?

Accepted Answer

Consistency and maintainability across the codebase

Answer

A common exception hierarchy and error-handling framework reduce divergent error-handling patterns, improving consistency and long-term maintainability.

Question 3

In a CPSA context, which technique decouples a cross-cutting concern from business logic by using declarative metadata (e.g., annotations)?

Accepted Answer

Decorator / annotation-driven programming

Answer

Annotation-driven decoration lets frameworks apply cross-cutting behavior (e.g., @Transactional, @Cacheable) without embedding that logic inside the business class itself.

Question 4

Which cross-cutting strategy reduces the blast radius of a misconfigured or compromised service in a microservices system?

Accepted Answer

Principle of least privilege applied to service-to-service permissions

Answer

Least-privilege permissions limit what a compromised service can access, containing the damage to only the resources that service legitimately needs.

Question 5

A CPSA architect is asked to ensure repeatable, deterministic deployments across all environments. Which cross-cutting practice best achieves this?

Accepted Answer

Immutable infrastructure combined with infrastructure-as-code

Answer

Immutable infrastructure with infrastructure-as-code ensures every environment is provisioned identically from version-controlled definitions, eliminating configuration drift.

CPSA Exam Practice Test

CPSA Exam Practice Test

CPSA Cross-cutting Concepts 5