S90-08A SOA Design & Architecture Lab Practice Questions
Prepare for S90-08A with more than an answer.
- Exam fee
- $295 USD
- Level
- Professional
- Valid for
- Lifetime
Domains covered on the exam 5
- Advanced SOA Design Patterns30%
- Service-Oriented Architectural Models25%
- Service Data Management and Transactions20%
- Legacy Integration and Protocol Management15%
- Governance, Security, and Messaging10%
- 1
A logistics company has a legacy system for managing its fleet of trucks. The system is written in COBOL and runs on a mainframe. The company wants to expose a 'GetTruckLocation' capability as a modern RESTful service for new mobile applications. The development team is tasked with integrating with the mainframe system with minimal changes to the legacy code. Which pattern provides a non-invasive way to expose the mainframe's functionality as a standard service?
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Correct answer: A
The Legacy Wrapper pattern is the correct choice. This pattern involves creating a new service (the wrapper) that encapsulates the logic required to communicate with the legacy system. The wrapper service exposes a standard, modern contract (like a REST API) and internally handles the complex interaction with the mainframe, such as screen scraping or using a specific adapter. This approach is non-invasive as it requires no changes to the existing legacy system.
- 2
You are designing an SOA governance framework. A key requirement is to have a centralized, definitive source for all service contracts and related metadata that can be accessed by both design-time tools (for developers) and run-time systems (like an ESB or API Gateway). Which architectural component is specifically intended to fulfill this role?
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Correct answer: B
A Service Repository is the correct component. While a Service Registry primarily stores technical endpoint information for runtime discovery, a Service Repository is a more comprehensive governance tool. It stores the service contracts (WSDLs, OpenAPI specs), schemas, policies, and other design-time metadata, acting as the single source of truth for service definitions.
- 3
An architect is designing a system where multiple consumer applications need to be notified whenever a customer's address is updated. The architect wants to avoid a point-to-point integration where the Customer service must know about and call every interested consumer. Which messaging pattern provides the most loosely coupled solution for this requirement?
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Correct answer: C
The Publish-Subscribe pattern is the ideal solution. The Customer service (the publisher) sends an 'AddressUpdated' event to a message channel (topic) without any knowledge of the consumers. Multiple consumer applications (subscribers) can subscribe to this topic and will receive the event notification. This decouples the publisher from the subscribers, allowing new subscribers to be added without any changes to the Customer service.
flowchart TD subgraph Publisher A[Customer Service] end subgraph Messaging_System B(AddressUpdated Topic) end subgraph Subscribers C[Billing Service] D[Shipping Service] E[Marketing Service] end A -- Publishes Event --> B B -- Pushes to --> C B -- Pushes to --> D B -- Pushes to --> E - 4
A service composition involves three services: A, B, and C. Service A initiates the process. Service B is a long-running service that can take several minutes to complete. Service C can only be called after Service B has successfully finished. The architect wants to implement this using orchestration. Which of the following accurately describes the role of the orchestration engine in this scenario?
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Correct answer: B
This describes the core function of orchestration. The orchestration engine contains the business process logic and acts as a central coordinator. It actively controls the flow of the composition, invoking services in a specific order, waiting for responses, and managing the state of the overall process. This is in contrast to choreography, where services react to each other's events without a central controller.
- 5
An agricultural IoT solution involves thousands of field sensors that communicate using the lightweight MQTT protocol. A central analytics platform is designed to ingest data from a Kafka topic. Which integration pattern is required to connect these two disparate systems?
graph TD subgraph Field Sensor[IoT Sensor] end subgraph Cloud Analytics[Analytics Platform] end subgraph Integration Broker((MQTT Broker)) Kafka[Kafka Topic] end Sensor -- MQTT --> Broker Broker --> |?| Kafka Kafka --> AnalyticsShow answer details
Correct answer: B
The core issue is the difference in communication protocols between the data source (MQTT) and the data sink (Kafka). The Protocol Bridging pattern addresses this directly by providing a component (a bridge) that receives messages via one protocol and forwards them using another. This is a common pattern in IoT and integration platforms.
- 6
A healthcare provider is architecting a new patient onboarding process that involves multiple, long-running activities: identity verification via an external service, an insurance eligibility check with a partner system, and internal patient record creation. The entire process can take several hours to complete, and its state must be maintained reliably. Which combination of patterns provides the most suitable solution for managing the long-running, stateful nature of this business activity while maintaining central control over the process flow?
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Correct answer: B
This is the optimal solution. Process Abstraction establishes a parent orchestration service to centrally control the flow. A State Repository is essential for persisting the state of the long-running transaction. Compensating Service Transactions are required to ensure the entire process can be reliably reversed if any step fails, which is critical for processes that cannot use atomic transactions.
- 7
Company Background:
GlobalLogistics Inc. is modernizing its legacy shipping platform using SOA principles. Their primary goal is to establish a highly reusable service inventory that can be consumed by various front-end applications and external partners.Current Situation:
The existing system is a large monolith where components for quoting, booking, tracking, and invoicing shipments are tightly coupled. Business logic is frequently duplicated across different modules, making maintenance difficult and hindering the rapid development of new features.Architectural Requirements:
The new architecture must support diverse consumer types, including a public web portal, a mobile application for drivers, and API integrations for corporate partners. Key requirements include enforcing a clear separation of concerns, maximizing the reuse of business logic and data, and isolating core business entities from process-specific logic. The architects have mandated the use of a layered service architecture.Identified Services:
GetCustomerDetailsUpdateShipmentStatusCalculateShippingRateOrchestrateBookingProcessValidateAddressFormatGenerateInvoicePDF
As the lead architect, you must classify these services into the correct service layers. Which option correctly categorizes the proposed services into Entity, Task, and Utility layers to meet the design goals?
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Correct answer: A
This option provides the correct classification. Entity services (
GetCustomerDetails,UpdateShipmentStatus) encapsulate specific business entities. The Task service (OrchestrateBookingProcess) coordinates other services to execute a business process. Utility services (CalculateShippingRate,ValidateAddressFormat,GenerateInvoicePDF) provide reusable, business-agnostic functions that can support multiple processes. - 8
A financial services company is implementing a cross-border money transfer process. The process involves three distinct, autonomous services:
DebitSourceAccount,PerformCurrencyConversion, andCreditDestinationAccount. The entire operation must be treated as a single logical unit of work. However, because it involves services that could be owned by different entities and may experience delays, a traditional two-phase commit (2PC) atomic transaction is not feasible. The architect has decided to use the Compensating Service Transaction pattern.Which TWO actions are essential for the successful implementation of the Compensating Service Transaction pattern in this scenario? (Select TWO)
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Correct answer: A, B
- 9
An insurance company is integrating its modern, REST-based claims processing service with a legacy mainframe system that only communicates via fixed-width text files over FTP. The integration point is an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). The initial design simply wraps the FTP transfer in a synchronous service call. During testing, the claims service frequently times out because the mainframe batch process takes over five minutes to generate and place the file on the FTP server.
What combination of patterns should an architect introduce into the ESB to resolve the timeout issue and create a more robust, decoupled integration?
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Correct answer: B
The core problem is the synchronous coupling between a fast REST service and a slow batch system. Asynchronous Queuing decouples the two, allowing the claims service to post a request and move on immediately, thus resolving the timeout. The Protocol Bridging pattern is then applied by the ESB to handle the translation from the message in the queue (e.g., JSON over JMS) to the required FTP file transfer, bridging the technology gap.
sequenceDiagram participant C as Claims Service participant ESB participant M as Mainframe Note over C, M: Before (Synchronous Call) C->>+ESB: ProcessClaim(REST) ESB->>+M: GenerateFile(FTP) Note right of M: Takes 5+ minutes M-->>-ESB: File Ready ESB-->>-C: Response (Timeout Occurs) Note over C, M: After (Asynchronous Queuing) C->>ESB: SendClaim(JMS) ESB-->>C: Acknowledged ESB->>M: GenerateFile(FTP) Note right of M: Takes 5+ minutes M-->>ESB: File Ready - 10
True or False: Applying the Policy Centralization pattern requires that all business logic related to policy enforcement be removed from individual service implementations and managed by a dedicated policy enforcement agent or service.
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Correct answer: A
The fundamental purpose of the Policy Centralization pattern is to externalize policy logic from service implementations. This allows policies (such as security, auditing, or SLA monitoring) to be managed, updated, and applied consistently across multiple services without requiring changes to the services themselves, thus promoting loose coupling and agility.
