MCIA-Level-1 MuleSoft Certified Integration Architect - Level 1 Questions and Answers

Explanation

* "Create a Mule domain project that maintains the credentials as Mule domain-shared resources" is wrong as domain project is not supported in Cloudhub * We should Avoid Creating duplicates in each Mule application but below two options cause duplication of credentials - Store the credentials in properties files in a shared folder within the organization’s data center. Have the Mule applications load properties files from this shared location at startup - Segregate the credentials for each backend system into environment-specific properties files. Package these properties files in each Mule application, from where they are loaded at startup So these are also wrong choices * Credentials service is the best approach in this scenario. Mule domain projects are not supported on CloudHub. Also its is not recommended to have multiple copies of configuration values as this makes difficult to maintain Use the Mule Credentials Vault to encrypt data in a .properties file. (In the context of this document, we refer to the .properties file simply as the properties file.) The properties file in Mule stores data as key-value pairs which may contain information such as usernames, first and last names, and credit card numbers. A Mule application may access this data as it processes messages, for example, to acquire login credentials for an external Web service. However, though this sensitive, private data must be stored in a properties file for Mule to access, it must also be protected against unauthorized – and potentially malicious – use by anyone with access to the Mule application

To use a dedicated load balancer in your environment, you must first create an Anypoint VPC. Because you can associate multiple environments with the same Anypoint VPC, you can use the same dedicated load balancer for your different environments.

Explanation

Correct answer is Federated Identity Management As the Anypoint Platform organization administrator, you can configure identity management in Anypoint Platform to set up users for single sign-on (SSO). Configure identity management using one of the following single sign-on standards: OpenID Connect: End user identity verification by an authorization server including SSO SAML 2.0: Web-based authorization including cross-domain SSO Where as Client Management is where Anypoint Platform acts as a client provider by default, but you can also configure external client providers to authorize client applications. As an API owner, you can apply an OAuth 2.0 policy to authorize client applications that try to access your API. You need an OAuth 2.0 provider to use an OAuth 2.0 policy

Explanation

High availability is about up-time of your application

A) High availability can be achieved only in CloudHub isn't correct statement. It can be achieved in customer hosted runtime planes as well

B) An object store is a facility for storing objects in or across Mule applications. Mule runtime engine (Mule) uses object stores to persist data for eventual retrieval. It can be used for disaster recovery but not for High Availability. Using object store can't guarantee that all instances won't go down at once. So not an appropriate choice.

Explanation

* Mule High Availability Clustering provides basic failover capability for Mule. * When the primary Mule Runtime becomes unavailable, for example, because of a fatal JVM or hardware failure or it’s taken offline for maintenance, a backup Mule Runtime immediately becomes the primary node and resumes processing where the failed instance left off. * After a system administrator recovers a failed Mule Runtime server and puts it back online, that server automatically becomes the backup node. In this case, Alice, once up, will become backup ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reference: https://docs.mulesoft.com/mule-runtime/4.3/hadr-guide So correct choice is : Files are polled form Bob node Bob is now the primary node

Explanation

When an operation in a Mule application fails to connect to an external server, the default behavior is for the operation to fail immediately and return a connectivity error. You can modify this default behavior by configuring a reconnection strategy for the operation. You can configure a reconnection strategy for an operation either by modifying the operation properties or by modifying the configuration of the global element for the operation. The following are the available reconnection strategies and their behaviors: None Is the default behavior, which immediately returns a connectivity error if the attempt to connect is unsuccessful Standard (reconnect) Sets the number of reconnection attempts and the interval at which to execute them before returning a connectivity error Forever (reconnect-forever) Attempts to reconnect continually at a given interval

Explanation

* Organization should continue to use SCM system of their choice, in addition to keeping source code for these asset types in Anypoint Exchange, thereby enabling parallel development, branching.

* Reason is that Anypoint exchange is not full fledged version repositories like GitHub.

* But at same time it is tightly coupled with Mule assets

The mocking service is a feature of Anypoint Platform and runs continuously. You can run the mocking service from the text editor, the visual editor, and from Anypoint Exchange. You can simulate calls to the API in API Designer before publishing the API specification to Exchange or in Exchange after publishing the API specification.

Explanation

Correct answer is An HTTP Load Balancer.

Key thing to note here is that we are deploying application to customer hosted Mule runtime. This means we will need load balancer to route the requests to different instances of the cluster.

Rest all options are distractors and their requirement depends on project use case.

Explanation

Correct answer is Depending on the Listener operation configuration, either all messages are consumed by ONLY the primary cluster node or else EACH message is consumed by ANY ONE cluster node

For applications running in clusters, you have to keep in mind the concept of primary node and how the connector will behave. When running in a cluster, the JMS listener default behavior will be to receive messages only in the primary node, no matter what kind of destination you are consuming from. In case of consuming messages from a Queue, you’ll want to change this configuration to receive messages in all the nodes of the cluster, not just the primary.

This can be done with the primaryNodeOnly parameter:

Explanation

Correct answer is Anypoint Runtime Manager

MuleSoft Anypoint Runtime Manager (ARM) provides connectivity to Mule Runtime engines deployed across your organization to provide centralized management, monitoring and analytics reporting. However, most enterprise customers find it necessary for these on-premises runtimes to integrate with their existing non MuleSoft analytics / monitoring systems such as Splunk and ELK to support a single pane of glass view across the infrastructure.

* You can configure the Runtime Manager agent to export data to external analytics tools.

Using either the Runtime Manager cloud console or Anypoint Platform Private Cloud Edition, you can:

--> Send Mule event notifications, including flow executions and exceptions, to Splunk or ELK.

--> Send API Analytics to Splunk or ELK. Sending data to third-party tools is not supported for applications deployed on CloudHub.

You can use the CloudHub custom log appender to integrate with your logging system. Reference: https://docs.mulesoft.com/runtime-manager/ https://docs.mulesoft.com/release-notes/runtime-manager-agent/runtime-manager-agent-release-notes

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Additional Info:

It can be achieved in 3 steps:

1) register an agent to a runtime manager,

2) configure a gateway to enable API analytics to be sent to non MuleSoft analytics platform (Splunk for ex.) – as highlighted in the following diagram and

3) setup dashboards.

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Explanation

* As per definition of API by Mulesoft , it is Application Programming Interface using HTTP-based protocols. Non-HTTP-based programmatic interfaces are not APIs.

* HTTP-based programmatic interfaces are APIs even if they don’t use REST or JSON. Hence implementation based on Java RMI, CORBA/IIOP, raw TCP/IP interfaces are not API's as they are not using HTTP.

* One more thing to note is FTP was not built to be secure. It is generally considered to be an insecure protocol because it relies on clear-text usernames and passwords for authentication and does not use encryption.

* Data sent via FTP is vulnerable to sniffing, spoofing, and brute force attacks, among other basic attack methods.

Considering the above points only correct option is

-XML over ActiveMQ

- XML over SFTP

- XML/REST over HTTPS

Explanation

Correct answer is VM VM support Transactional Type. When an exception occur, The transaction rolls back to its original state for reprocessing. This feature is not supported by other connectors.

Here is additional information about Transaction management:

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Explanation

* An X.509 certificate is a vital safeguard against malicious network impersonators. Without x.509 server authentication, man-in-the-middle attacks can be initiated by malicious access points, compromised routers, etc.

* X.509 is most used for SSL/TLS connections to ensure that the client (e.g., a web browser) is not fooled by a malicious impersonator pretending to be a known, trustworthy website.

* Coming to the question , we can not use SLB here as SLB does not allow to define vanity domain names. * Hence we need to use DLB and add certificate in there

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Hence correct answer is Add the X 509 certificate to the cloudhub Dedicated Load Balancer (DLB), not the Mule application. Create the CNAME for api.acme.com pointing to the DLB’s record

https://docs.mulesoft.com/runtime-manager/dedicated-load-balancer-tutorial

Explanation

Correct answer is EACH item VM message is processed AT LEAST ONCE by ONE ARBITRARY CloudHub worker. Each of the four CloudHub workers can be expected to process some item VM messages In Cloudhub, each persistent VM queue is listened on by every CloudHub worker - But each message is read and processed at least once by only one CloudHub worker and the duplicate processing is possible - If the CloudHub worker fails , the message can be read by another worker to prevent loss of messages and this can lead to duplicate processing - By default , every CloudHub worker's VM Listener receives different messages from VM Queue Referenece: https://dzone.com/articles/deploying-mulesoft-application-on-1-worker-vs-mult

Explanation

* XA transaction add tremendous latency so "Reduce Latency" is incorrect option XA transactions define "All or No" commit protocol.

* Each local XA resource manager supports the A.C.I.D properties (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability).

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So correct choice is "Ensure consistency"

Explanation

Context of the question is about managing and governing mule applications deployed on Anypoint platform.

Anypoint API Manager (API Manager) is a component of Anypoint Platform that enables you to manage, govern, and secure APIs. It leverages the runtime capabilities of API Gateway and Anypoint Service Mesh, both of which enforce policies, collect and track analytics data, manage proxies, provide encryption and authentication, and manage applications.

Mule Ref Doc : https://docs.mulesoft.com/api-manager/2.x/getting-started-proxy

Explanation

Correct answer is When a Mule runtime on a given customer-hosted server is experiencing high memory consumption during certain periods Using Anypoint Monitoring, you can configure two different types of alerts: Basic alerts for servers and Mule apps Limit per organization: Up to 50 basic alerts for users who do not have a Titanium subscription to Anypoint Platform You can set up basic alerts to trigger email notifications when a metric you are measuring passes a specified threshold. You can create basic alerts for the following metrics for servers or Mule apps: For on-premises servers and CloudHub apps: * CPU utilization * Memory utilization * Thread count Advanced alerts for graphs in custom dashboards in Anypoint Monitoring. You must have a Titanium subscription to use this feature. Limit per organization: Up to 20 advanced alerts

Set the Anypoint MQ connector operation to publish or consume messages, or to accept (ACK) or not accept (NACK) a message.