S90.03 Sample Questions & Answers
Service-orientation principles, design patterns and contract design carry the most weight, next to fundamentals of SOA and microservices, web services and enterprise integration, advanced messaging and governance, and practical design case studies.
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- Question 1Intermediate
SOA Design & Architecture · Service Discoverability
An organization has successfully implemented several autonomous, reusable services. However, business analysts are struggling to create new processes because they don't have a clear, consolidated view of the available business capabilities. The service contracts are highly technical and spread across different repositories. Which design principle has been inadequately applied, leading to this problem?
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Correct answer: D
The core issue is that business-level stakeholders cannot find and understand the available services. Service Discoverability addresses this by requiring services to be supplemented with communicative metadata. This includes not just technical contracts but also business-centric descriptions, capabilities, and usage policies that enable both technical and non-technical users to effectively find, interpret, and compose services.
- Question 2Intermediate
Fundamental SOA, Services & Microservices · Sub-Controller Capability
A sub-controller service capability is distinct from a regular service capability primarily because it is designed to be both a service consumer and a composable part of a larger service composition. It encapsulates a specific, reusable piece of composition logic. Which of the following is the BEST example of a sub-controller's function?
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Correct answer: D
This is a perfect example of a sub-controller. It encapsulates a specific piece of composition logic (checking internal and external sources) that is reusable within larger processes (like 'New Customer Onboarding' or 'Loan Application'). It consumes other services (internal records, external bureau) and is itself designed to be composed by a parent controller service.
- Question 3Intermediate
Advanced SOA Design & Architecture · Microservice Deployment Patterns
A development team is building a set of microservices that will be deployed in containers managed by Kubernetes. To handle cross-cutting concerns like logging, monitoring, and security, the lead architect suggests using a pattern where these functions are implemented in a separate, attached container within the same pod. Which pattern is being described?
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Correct answer: C
The Sidecar pattern involves deploying components of an application into a separate process or container to provide isolation and encapsulation. In a Kubernetes context, a sidecar is a container that runs alongside the main application container in the same Pod. This is commonly used for cross-cutting concerns like logging, monitoring, security, or as part of a service mesh.
- Question 4Intermediate
Advanced SOA Design & Architecture · API Gateway Patterns
A retail company is migrating its monolithic e-commerce platform to a microservices architecture. They need a centralized way to handle requests from various clients (web, mobile, partner APIs), providing routing, authentication, and protocol translation. Different clients may require different data compositions from the backend services. Which architectural pattern should be implemented at the edge of the system to fulfill these requirements?
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Correct answer: C
An API Gateway is a server that acts as a single entry point into the system. It is responsible for request routing, composition, and protocol translation. It can also handle cross-cutting concerns like authentication, SSL termination, and rate limiting. This pattern is ideal for microservice architectures as it decouples clients from the internal service topology and provides a tailored API for each client type.
- Question 5Advanced
SOA Design & Architecture Lab · Case Study: Legacy Modernization
Case Study:
Company Background: GlobalExpress Logistics (GEL) is a large shipping company with a mix of modern and legacy IT systems. Their core shipment processing is handled by a 20-year-old mainframe system that is reliable but difficult to integrate with. GEL wants to provide a new 'Premium Partner Portal' that allows key corporate clients to integrate their own systems directly with GEL's for creating shipments, getting quotes, and tracking packages.
Current Situation: The mainframe exposes its functionality via a proprietary socket-based protocol and processes requests in a stateful manner, requiring a persistent connection for each partner session. The data formats are based on fixed-width text files. GEL's internal development teams have some experience with REST and SOAP but not with the mainframe's protocol. The business demands that the new partner portal be highly available and scalable, and that new partners can be onboarded within days, not months.
Requirements:
- Expose GEL's shipping capabilities via standardized, stateless web services (REST/JSON is preferred).
- Decouple the partner-facing services from the mainframe's proprietary protocol and stateful nature.
- Ensure the solution does not require any modification to the existing mainframe application code.
- Provide a consistent data contract (a canonical model) for all partners, regardless of the mainframe's internal data formats.
Which architectural approach best meets all of GEL's requirements?
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Correct answer: C
This solution correctly addresses all requirements. The Service Façade provides the standardized REST/JSON interface (Req 1). It decouples partners from the mainframe (Req 2). Protocol Bridging is the specific pattern for translating between the modern HTTP and legacy socket protocols without modifying the mainframe (Req 3). Data Model Transformation handles the conversion to a canonical model (Req 4). This is the most complete and pattern-oriented SOA solution.
- Question 6Beginner
SOA Design & Architecture · Service Statelessness Principle
A service is designed to be agnostic and reusable across multiple business processes. To maximize its reusability, it should not retain any information about past interactions between service calls. This design choice directly supports which service-orientation principle?
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Correct answer: C
Service Statelessness is the principle that services should minimize the amount of state information they manage and retain between requests. By not retaining state, a service becomes highly reusable and scalable, as any instance of the service can handle any request without needing prior context. This directly supports its ability to be used agnostically in various business processes.
- Question 7Intermediate
SOA Design & Architecture · Standardized Service Contract
An architect is evaluating two different approaches for designing a service contract. Approach A uses a 'contract-first' methodology, where the service contract (WSDL or OpenAPI spec) is designed and standardized before any implementation code is written. Approach B uses a 'code-first' methodology, where the contract is automatically generated from the service implementation code. Which service-orientation principle is better supported by Approach A?
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Correct answer: B
The 'contract-first' approach strongly supports Service Loose Coupling. By designing the contract independently of the implementation, it establishes a clear separation between what the service promises (the contract) and how it delivers on that promise (the implementation). This allows the implementation to change without affecting consumers, as long as the contract remains stable. Code-first approaches, in contrast, often lead to contracts that are tightly coupled to implementation-specific details.
- Question 8Beginner
SOA Design & Architecture · Schema Centralization Pattern
The ___________ is a compound pattern that logically centralizes enterprise-wide data type definitions to ensure that services conforming to the same service contract share the same data model interpretation.
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Correct answer: B
The Schema Centralization pattern advocates for the creation of a common, centralized set of schemas (e.g., XSDs or JSON Schemas) that define the data models used in service contracts. This promotes data standardization and ensures semantic compatibility between services that exchange information, directly supporting the Standardized Service Contract principle.
- Question 9Intermediate
Service Technology Concepts · Message Exchange Patterns (MEP)
A team is designing a service composition that retrieves data from three different entity services and aggregates the results. To improve performance, they want to invoke all three services concurrently rather than sequentially. The following diagram illustrates the proposed interaction. Which message exchange pattern (MEP) is required to initiate these concurrent calls from the composition logic?
sequenceDiagram participant Comp as Composition Logic participant SvcA as Service A participant SvcB as Service B participant SvcC as Service C Comp->>SvcA: Request Data A Comp->>SvcB: Request Data B Comp->>SvcC: Request Data C SvcA-->>Comp: Response A SvcB-->>Comp: Response B SvcC-->>Comp: Response CShow answer & explanation
Correct answer: C
To invoke multiple services concurrently, the composition logic must send requests without waiting for an immediate response. This is achieved using the One-Way MEP, also known as 'fire-and-forget'. The composition logic sends the requests and can then asynchronously wait for the callbacks or responses. A synchronous Request-Response MEP would force sequential execution, as the caller would block waiting for each response before sending the next request.
- Question 10IntermediateSelect 3
SOA Design & Architecture · Service Loose Coupling Principle
What are the primary goals of applying the Service Loose Coupling principle? (Select THREE)
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Correct answers: A, B, D
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