IBM A1000-005 Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

A financial institution is modernizing a monolith into a service-oriented architecture. Two new services (Payments and FraudCheck) are being introduced. FraudCheck depends on an external vendor that is occasionally slow and sometimes returns ambiguous results. The business requires: (1) Payments must not fail simply because FraudCheck is slow; (2) FraudCheck must still be invoked for risk control; (3) The end-to-end outcome must be auditable and reproducible. Which architectural approach best satisfies these constraints while aligning with SOA principles?

An enterprise has multiple consumer applications calling a shared "CustomerProfile" service. The service currently returns a large canonical payload. Some consumers only need a subset; others require additional attributes that are expensive to compute. Performance issues are increasing, and the team wants to improve without breaking existing consumers. Which design change best balances SOA contract stability with performance and evolvability?

A composite business process orchestrates three services: Inventory, Pricing, and Order. The process must support retriable failures, ensure no double-shipping, and tolerate duplicate messages from the integration layer. During a recent outage, the process retried and resulted in two shipments for the same order. Which change most directly addresses this while remaining consistent with robust SOA integration practices?

A company uses a canonical data model in its enterprise service bus (ESB). Over time, the canonical model has become a "god schema" that forces frequent changes and breaks downstream mappings when any domain adds a new concept. Teams complain that releases are blocked by canonical model governance. Which architectural adjustment best reduces coupling while preserving enterprise interoperability?

A new "Account" service is planned for reuse by internal systems and external partners. Requirements include: strict backward compatibility, ability to introduce new features without breaking older consumers, clear ownership of contract changes, and testable guarantees about contract behavior. Which practice best meets these requirements?

An organization has a synchronous "Quote" service that calls three downstream services. Under load, thread pools exhaust and latency spikes. Traces show most time is spent waiting on downstream responses. The organization cannot immediately scale downstream systems. Which design change most effectively addresses the failure mode while maintaining functional correctness?

A message-driven integration uses at-least-once delivery. During peak times, a consumer service intermittently fails after performing a database update but before acknowledging the message. The broker redelivers, causing occasional duplicate updates. You cannot change the broker semantics. Which implementation strategy best ensures correctness with minimal coupling to the broker?

A platform team is defining SOA governance for dozens of teams. Incidents show that consumers often bypass the service catalog and call internal endpoints directly, leading to breakages when implementations change. The CIO wants governance that is enforceable but does not significantly slow delivery. Which governance mechanism best addresses the root cause?

A regulated enterprise must demonstrate end-to-end traceability for business transactions spanning multiple services and asynchronous messaging. During audits, they must reconstruct who called what, with which inputs, and what decision was made—even if services have been redeployed. Which approach best meets auditability and operational needs without overly coupling services?

A retail company integrates an external partner for shipment creation. The partner API is synchronous and occasionally returns timeouts, but may still create the shipment. The retail system must avoid creating duplicate shipments and must eventually reflect the true partner state. Which integration pattern and design combination is most appropriate?