Solution Architecture Process Flashcards
7 cards from real CMA practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 7 Solution Architecture Process flashcards as text
In a multi-cloud solution architecture, which concern is most critical to address in the design to avoid vendor lock-in?
Answer: Defining abstraction layers and portable data formats across providers
Abstraction layers and portable standards (containers, open APIs, cloud-agnostic data formats) allow workloads to be migrated between providers, reducing dependency on any single vendor.
A CMA is designing a solution that must support 10x current load within 18 months. Which architectural characteristic is most relevant to prioritize?
Answer: Horizontal Scalability
Horizontal scalability allows the solution to handle increased load by adding more instances rather than upgrading hardware, making it the primary concern for anticipated 10x growth.
Which technique is most effective for communicating architecture decisions and their rationale to a mixed technical and non-technical audience?
Answer: Architecture Decision Records (ADRs)
Architecture Decision Records document the context, decision, rationale, and consequences in structured prose, making them accessible to both technical and business stakeholders.
During the Opportunities and Solutions phase, what is the primary basis for sequencing work packages in the implementation roadmap?
Answer: Dependencies between building blocks, business value, and implementation risk
Roadmap sequencing is driven by logical dependencies between components, the business value each work package delivers, and risk-adjusted timing to ensure a viable transition path.
A solution architect proposes caching as a performance optimization. Which cache invalidation challenge must be explicitly designed for?
Answer: Serving stale data to users after source data has been updated
Cache invalidation — ensuring cached data is refreshed when the underlying data changes — is the fundamental design challenge because stale data can cause correctness and consistency problems.
When an enterprise architecture team rejects a solution architecture for non-compliance, what is the appropriate next step for the solution architect?
Answer: Document a formal Architecture Dispensation request with justification
An Architecture Dispensation formally documents the deviation, its justification, risks, and compensating controls, providing an auditable path for compliant non-compliance.
Which quality attribute is most directly improved by implementing circuit breaker patterns in a distributed solution?
Answer: Resilience and fault isolation
Circuit breakers detect failing dependencies and stop cascading failures by short-circuiting calls to unhealthy services, directly improving the solution's resilience and ability to isolate faults.